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Comment by geofft | Hacker News Reader

This is a frustrating line of argument because it ignores the entire reason that opponents of intellectual property are opponents of intellectual property: that intellectual property can be duplicated without harm to the owner. Protection of real estate or other physical property is rooted in the principle that depriving the original owner of the use of their property is unjust. "Theft" of intellectual property does not deprive the original owner of anything; it simply (perhaps) makes the potential market more competitive.

I really wish we would be able to move past these extremely basic arguments and have some discussion of the topic that isn't repeating the same thing over and over. It's fine to disagree with the duplication argument, but it's a waste of everyone's time to pretend it doesn't exist.

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Duplication does harm the owner, because Samsung needs to recoup the R&D money they spent and the thief does not. Because they stole the tech, the thief can undercut Samsung on pricing, ensuring that Samsung never can be profitable enough to recoup their R&D.

There are other ways to solve that problem. One of the more straightforward ways (with precedent in US law) is a compulsory license: allow anyone to get a license to use the invention if they pay Samsung, without giving Samsung the opportunity to refuse.

Other options include collective funding of R&D (either the government-funding model, popular in the US for landing on the moon and creating the internet and taking a photo of a black hole, or the voluntary-collective model, popular in the US for creating basically all the technology we're using to have this conversation). If collective funding is more productive, this compensates the participants for R&D. And it may be subject to a prisoner's-dilemma problem, where any one entity can profitably defect even if everyone would be better off if no one did. Creating prisoner's-dilemma situation doesn't seem like a just use of the powers of government.

True, but this harm is handily offset by the benefit of an expanded use for the original tech, due to the very fact of its lower price. Critically, the more the thief is able to "undercut" e.g. Samsung on pricing, the higher this benefit. IP protection is thus more socially beneficial for tech that is expensive per se, because then there is too little "undercutting" to matter, and more like a direct transfer in value away from the creators. Folding phones are an interesting case; they obviously cannot be duplicated "costlessly", but their raw manufacturing costs are low enough that IP protection for them might still be somewhat undesirable.

That logic only applies in the case that the inventor built something for their own use, put in all the effort for their own use, and never planned on making a living off of it. The second that they invented something to profit off of/make a living off of, they are absolutely harmed when someone else copies it. I don't understand why this is even debatable.

Per the other commenter, unless you're suggesting that private property just shouldn't exist, then your argument falls apart. And if you are arguing private property shouldn't exist, I think you'll find very few takers.

This is a different argument for property than the one I was referencing. (I'm not arguing it's wrong, just that it's different.)

The argument I'm talking about is that the right to private property is the right to ownership/control. If I have X, and I am deprived of it / it is taken from me, it is unjust.

The argument you are referencing is that the right to private property is the right to exchange it at a certain value, and a negative impact on its market value is unjust. I can see some cases where this is true (e.g., buying a name-brand purse and finding it's an equally functional counterfeit), some where it's debatable (e.g., buying a house in a quiet neighborhood that gets loud), and some where it's not (e.g., buying a large quantity of a psychoactive substance that isn't controlled and then having it become controlled). So it seems like a weaker argument to me. I think you can still defend it by saying that the not-unjust cases are because there's a greater good / more important right being protected. But I also think you can just hold to the other definition of the right to private property.

In kindergartener terms: if I bring candy to school and my teacher takes it from me and eats it, that's wrong, that's stealing. If I bring candy to school with the intent to give it to other kids to boost my popularity, and the teacher tells me I can't do that and have to keep the candy in my bag, that doesn't seem like stealing.

I agree that compensating inventors is important. I disagree that treating inventions as property is the only way to do it.

>Iagree that compensating inventors is important. I disagree that treating inventions as property is the only way to do it.

So what is this magical means of Samsung being compensated for their multi-billion dollar investment that China stole that you don't think is a big deal?

As for your analogy, it's patently false that anyone involved wants the candy shared. It's been stolen.

> So what is this magical means of Samsung being compensated for their multi-billion dollar investment that China stole that you don't think is a big deal?

My claim in this thread is that not treating ideas as private property is a defensible and reasonable position to take. When you say that Samsung needs to be "compensated," you make it clear that you're not treating ideas as private property, either. The market value of property is the amount of benefit/enjoyment it provides someone else, not the amount of effort that went into making it. If I spend two hours making a cake, and you spend 30 minutes making a cake, and people want to pay both of us $10 for it, there is no violation of my property rights that I'm not compensated for spending 4x as long. You might casually say that my cake is "a steal," but the cake is definitely not being stolen from me.

If you were arguing about property rights, you would be asking about why Samsung isn't getting paid the fair market value of their ideas, not about why they aren't recouping the investment they put into creating them. (And I've even suggested elsewhere in this thread that compulsory licenses are a way to do this.)

But if you're interested in Samsung recouping their investment, well, we can discuss that but it's absolutely not property rights that are helping them do that today. If we want to discuss that, I'd simultaneously ask how to compensate people for multi-billion dollar investments that don't yield marketable products but are still good for humanity to have done the research.

> As for your analogy, it's patently false that anyone involved wants the candy shared. It's been stolen.

Not sure I follow. Samsung wants to trade phones for money. Samsung does want the phones shared: that's the entire basis of the argument The kid wants to trade candy for reputation. If you prevent Samsung from selling as many phones, no phones are being stolen. (Actually it turns out I didn't even need the analogy here.) If you prevent the kid from giving candy to classmates, no candy is being stolen. Why do you think the candy is being stolen?

> without harm to the owner

i don't quite see it.

if company A aims at the global market with a uniquely innovative product and then company B brings a copy of that product to the global market ten years later, then company A has enjoyed profitability of a unique product for ten years.

but what if company B spies on company A's process and steals copies of its designs and so brings a copy of that product to market ten months later?

isn't that depriving the original owner, company A, of some profits?

Depriving someone of potential profits isn't legally actionable harm. Otherwise we'd have to say that entering a market as a lower-cost and/or higher-quality competitor is a violation of the property rights, a theft of profit, of the existing participants.

You may or may not have a right to a fair market, and fairness may or may not include the right to secret research and development, but it's not because an unfair market harms your property rights or is "theft."

ok, but ... you originally said "harm" and now you're saying "legally actionable harm"

What sense of "harm" would it count as? If you entered a market and an existing competitor said "You harmed me, apologize," would you? If you were a doctor with an oath to "First do no harm," would you feel ethically obligated to never take business from another doctor?

I'm just thinking about profitability.

e.g. If I were a consultant to, say, Nvidia, and I told them that they were wasting valuable IT personnel time and resources by locking down and protecting their R&D documents, that all of the computers containing such info were needlessly and wastefully secure, and that, in short, there is no harm in making that info available to the public, including to Intel and AMD -- I mean, I just wonder how I would convince them.

Wouldn't they say something like "No. Releasing that info would be harmful to our bottom line, shareholders, and employees whose bonuses depend upon profitability."

If you were a consultant to the British East India Company in 1850 and told them that the world would be a better place for everyone if India were independent and not colonized by Britain, would you expect to convince them?

If you failed to convince them, would you then conclude that colonization is actually totally fine?

In particular, if someone were advocating for the independence of India in 1850, would you think the British East India Company could justifiably say "You're harming us"? (Sure, they can say it and they probably would say it, but would they have a point?)

I thought we were talking about "harm to the owner" of some IP, not making the world "a better place for everyone." A judgment or evaluation of what would be "totally fine" ethically for the whole world is a different discussion, I think.

I don't feel that the arguments you're presenting would be persuasive to the companies whose secrets are revealed. But, I may well be missing something. In any case, my takeaways from this discussion are:

1. You believe these companies don't have a solid legal case, that they cannot prove "harm" in the legal sense.

2. You believe that the system of protecting IP the US currently (in theory) embraces is sub-optimal for the well-being of the world.

Okay, fine, rephrase "without harm to the owner" as "without injustice to the owner" if that helps make my comment more understandable. I grant that there is a sense of "harm" under which deposing a dictator from his comfortable life harms the dictator, even if he isn't punished and is allowed to start a new life as a private citizen, and that's not the sense of "harm" I mean. I don't think there's a way you can argue that deposing him would be an injustice towards him.

Your logic only works if you can create digital copies of products ( products are not documents that aren't supposed to be distributed. Products are supposed to be distributed)

Eg. Product = movies

Eg. Not product = the nude selfies your girlfriend send to you.

It's not applicable to hardware and R&D. Also, it's seriously taken out of it's context to defend piracy.

You are generalizing the slang to everything, which isn't right.

This is a bad argument (as in, an argument that if followed leads to harmful conclusions) because it says the reason that redistribution of private naked selfies is bad is it harms the market value of naked selfies. It leads to all sorts of exciting nonsense like using the DMCA to stop revenge porn, and useless situations like the copyright owner of nonconsensual naked selfies being the photographer and not the subject.

Let's instead say that people have a right to control of their naked image for reasons that aren't about the property rights to the photo.

But you are wording it differently to your liking.

In the meantime, it's just the same. It's you and you have the rights to it.

It solves a problem. Your solution is weird and not generic

No, I identified two specific reasons why it's not the same: 1) in the US at least, copyright infringement is only criminal if done for financial gain (or a few other exceptions) 2) in all jurisdictions with the Berne definition of copyright, the copyright of a photo is owned by a photographer. So even if it's you, you don't have the rights to it if you didn't take the picture, and you can't pursue a copyright violation. So if your ex took a picture of you with your consent at the time, and is now spreading it on the internet, he has every right to do that, according to copyright.

Your solution doesn't solve these problems. If you want to solve these problems, you can't use copyright.

Theft removes the incentive to do r&d. If you are just going to get it stolen, others will just invest in stealing. No one will waste on r&d. There are reasons we have laws. You are making infantile arguments for pro theft with no thought to the obvious consequences. The fact that you’re getting upvoted on HN is alarming.

> If you are just going to get it stolen, others will just invest in stealing. No one will waste on r&d.

Okay, why does Linux exist? And why is it competitive with every proprietary OS kernel? And why does it get development from for-profit companies?

> There are reasons we have laws.

Of course there are. Many of those reasons are not good. In the specific realm of intellectual property law, some of those reasons are "because Disney has lobbyists".

I'm not sure this is historically supported. There's a long list of innovators who do not end up making the lion's share off of their achievements. I think innovation is just what we (humans ... or maybe even life in general?) do best and cultural values and need dictate how resources are allocated in this respect.

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