Progression of the Inevitable (2009) | Hacker News Reader

Progression of the Inevitable (2009)

kk.org

26 pointsrutenspitz5 comments

Of course, we are all simply "standing on the shoulders of giants" -- and also on the shoulders of everyone else, giant or no, that we rely on in this interconnected world. This kind of reasoning implies pretty strongly that intellectual property should not be privately owned, excluding others from its use who could just as likely have discovered it.

The term "intellectual property," while popular, is so vague as to be almost meaningless.

It is important to be precise. Patents, which are exclusive rights to ideas irrespective of origin, are much less defensible than other rights that are lumped into this category of intellectual property.

Trademarks and trade secrets have obvious reasons to remain privately owned. Trademarks prevent fraud and protect reputations. Trade secrets can only be acquired through espionage or breach of confidentiality contracts, both of which are clear types of aggression and invasion of privacy.

Copyrights are the grey area, because a copyright is only on a specific work with a specific origin. If I write a book that is similar to yours, that alone doesn't violate your copyright. With a patent, you could be in violation even if you never heard of the patentholder or their invention, but violating a copyright requires specifically distributing copies of the work of another. Duration is one of the key concerns here. But without copyrights, it is unclear how one could make a living as an author, a publisher, a musician, or a filmmaker.

If you think patents should be abolished, then say so, and you'll be on strong footing. If you think copyrights should be abolished, you better bring some good arguments. If you wish to abolish trademarks and trade secrets, then you are on extremely weak ground and also should not try to conflate these legal concepts with the others.

>But without copyrights, it is unclear how one could make a living as an author, a publisher, a musician, or a filmmaker.

IMO, the obsolescence of the perceived “need to make a living” is the Inevitable here.

I feel it's a little more complicated and nuanced than this article suggests. If there is this technological inevitability, how to explain the lack of wheels in the Americas mentioned in the article? Some argue that similarities in widely separated cultures like in South America and Egypt suggest an unknown common origin. The case of the wheel is a little hard to explain either way. We do have historical examples of technologies being largely lost / forgotten however (the fall of the Roman Empire and the dark ages, Easter Island). Is the wheel better explained by a common origin that one culture forgot or a failure of technological inevitability?

> The laws of genetics, like other inventions and discoveries, are crystals inherent in the technium, awaiting to materialize. There is nothing magical about these patterns, nothing mystical about technology having a direction. Every technology in the abstract is a latent structure

This reminds me of Meditations on Moloch, a great essay by Scott Alexander (https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/):

> Just as the course of a river is latent in a terrain even before the first rain falls on it – so the existence of Caesar’s Palace was latent in neurobiology, economics, and regulatory regimes even before it existed. The entrepreneur who built it was just filling in the ghostly lines with real concrete.

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