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Comment by kartickv | Hacker News Reader

> What would be my incentive for fixing something if I earn no money from it?

Your incentive would be that your product is better and sells more, unless and until everyone copies it. As long as the extra profit exceeds the cost invested, it's worth it.

You're claiming there would be no innovation at all unless there's IP.

How did we innovate for hundreds or thousands of years before IP laws, whether the wheel, ironmaking or any other technology?

To flip your question on its head, if IP laws prevent your innovation from reaching everyone, the benefit to society from this innovation is reduced, and that's bad.

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>Your incentive would be that your product is better and sells more

I'm curious if you ever tried to sell anything in large volumes. You can invent a brilliant thing but still have hard times selling it because of a lack of resources for marketing and a lack of established sales channels. At the same time, big resourceful corporations just steal you invention and resell it to existing customer base, use huge marketing resources, benefit from brand awareness, etc.

Inventing something better doesn't automatically guarantee you a solid revenue stream. Monetizing good inventions for a small company is a way less trivial task than it might seem.

I do have experience with how hard marketing is, but big companies copying small companies' work is not the only application of IP laws. Big companies can copy other big companies' work, and small companies can copy big companies' work. Besides, many small guys — independent developers, three-person teams — don't even have the resources to patent their stuff. Which means patent laws disproportionately benefit big companies.

> Besides, many small guys — independent developers, three-person teams — don't even have the resources to patent their stuff. Which means patent laws disproportionately benefit big companies.

Are you talking about software patents?

Yes.

That's already protected by copyright. I do not support software patents.

Sorry for not reading your original post carefully till now. However, I think my point still stands: if you have a product that people are paying you money for, say a camera, and you improve it, your product is more useful, and so you can charge more. Or sell more units at the same price. A camera that can record a timelapse is more useful than one that can't, whether or not other cameras record timelapses. In a world without copyright, the cost of improving your product also reduces, because you can take the code from somewhere, so it needn't sell that many extra units to recoup the lower cost.

In this way, eliminating copyright will create a race to the top, making all products better.

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