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Comment by pitaj | Hacker News Reader

I'll go several steps further: intellectual property is an invalid form of ownership and shouldn't exist at all. Piracy is always a just action because the monopoly over information given to people by the state is morally wrong.

"Intellectual property" is fundamentally different from classical property because information is not an exclusive good. If I hold an apple, you cannot hold the same apple, but we can both hold a digital copy with the same information.

There is no evidence that intellectual property is necessary for innovation or creative endeavors. There are many many ways to monetize creation including but not limited to subscription, donation, live shows, advertisement, and commission. http://www.dklevine.com/general/intellectual/againstfinal.ht...

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This is terribly naive. When digital replication is easy -- as it is with arts like music or software -- piracy destroys innovation and hurts creators who want to earn a living by selling their creations. It's not like the farmers or the apartment owners are going to let people "pirate" a warm place to sleep or a good meal.

IP haters often point to people who've successfully managed to encourage pseudo-piracy and made money. The Grateful Dead, for instance, let people freely copy mix tapes of their concerts and made their money on gate revenues. (They didn't let people in for free. Nope. )

If digital piracy is unchecked, then it forces artists to dream up other ways to make money. This creates inefficiencies and it just isn't fair to those who just want to sell their creations without holding a concert or drumming up some other scheme to get people to pay. Most "open source" companies spend endless hours trying to concoct ways to open source just enough of their product while forcing enough people to pay so everyone can eat.

I've found that most of the people who speak like pitaj are in universities and they make their money through some mixture of outrageous tuition bills that can't be dodged or government funding from taxes that can't be escaped.

There's no such thing as a free lunch.

I don't think people stealing would stop an artist from creating art. I think for people who view it as an ends to a mean, and make a living, it might make them seek other means of employment. But for the idealistic morons out there who create for the sake of creating, this wouldn't stop them in the least bit.

> But for the idealistic morons out there who create for the sake of creating, this wouldn't stop them in the least bit.

You'll notice the bait-and-switch modern society does here. We're supposed to value and respect artists, because they're "morons (...) who create for the sake of creating", who want to express their feelings and communicate their thoughts. And then we're given "artists" whose primary purpose is to make money through their creative works. I think we shouldn't be calling these two groups of people using the same word.

I think for the consumer who is willing to put in the effort, it's not hard to find the true artists. Sometimes they may be on the billboard 100, but chances are most of them are not. There's a rabbit hole of art to consume and pontificate over. I don't think the tragedy is that more people aren't aware of great artists. I think the real tragedy is that even if they were aware of it, they wouldn't give a damn.

Perhaps a solution should be engineered for that consumer who is looking, and that would be an art to avoid the mainstream bloat that would come with producing a mechanism like that.

Linux and the open source ecosystem is evidence that creativeness is not limited to creators who sell a product.

This creates inefficiencies and it just isn't fair to those who just want to sell their creations without holding a concert or drumming up some other scheme to get people to pay.

Are you arguing that it's unfair that a business needs to sell something that people are willing to pay for in order to make money?

That’s a specious argument. People are willing to pay large amounts of money for content. That has nothing to do with the propriety if people taking that content for free, other than it proves that those people are getting a valuable thing for nothing.

If the tried and true method of getting paid is through concerts, Patreon, crowdfunding new albums, or selling CDs in the street, I don't think the market is as "unfair" as xhkkffbf is arguing.

I agree that this has nothing to do with the propriety of people taking content with a price tag for free. But I think muddling the market sense of fairness (I don't want to/cannot perform in a concert; people should pay me for selling MP3s online) and the ethics of copying data is dangerous. Especially when we are solving the problem through legislation.

There's nothing tried and true about that method. Artists do it because they have to, and the overwhelming majority of them are unable to make a full-time career out of it, and either relegate art to a side-hustle or take full-time jobs adjacent to their art (like recording engineering or record production).

> Are you arguing that it's unfair that a business needs to sell something that people are willing to pay for

I argue against that media companies are using goon squads (police, judges, industrial-prison complex) to rob people who pirate their money or their freedom.

The fact that pircay exists exactly does show that their exist people that do not want to pay.

> The fact that pircay exists exactly does show that their exist people that do not want to pay.

Many people use piracy to get art they literally cannot buy legally. Many others use it to get digital versions of physical media they bought.

I also know a lot of rich people who pirate the shit out of anything they can find.

> does show that their exist people that do not want to pay.

Of course not? This entire thread is talking about how IP is a sham. Its totally out of touch with physical reality. The original design of IP to begin with was more to protect the printers than the artists themselves - the problem that needed addressing in the 17th-18th century during the dawn of IP protection wasn't that creativity was this new thing people were trying out - it was that industrial printing of media was suddenly a thing at a scale whereby the manufacturers of books wanted their infrastructure protected from scalpers undercutting their expensive runs of literature.

IP was conceived as a romantic way to protect the middle men of creativity from the start, and while those middle men still exist, their function has been totally technologically obsoleted to the point where random strangers I have never and will never meet are offering to send me copies of things I want for free. That is damn magic that could not have happened even thirty years ago. There was always a marginal cost to information transfer that is now gone, and with its departure the hollow justifications for information monopolies at gunpoint are plain to see as immoral and unreasonable.

They always were, it was always a protection racket for middle men, but at least last century the economic indicators aligned marginally with the concept. Now they are in total opposition to physical reality and those that realize it are less guilt tripped by pirating some corporation larger than several nations works.

The vast majority of human expression was created before the concept of "IP" existed. The business models we've had in the last few hundred years are the aberration, not the other way around.

Creators aren't entitled to a "fair" world. Nobody is.

Speaking of "fairness": How is it "fair" that someone should be entitled to profit again-and-again from a single act of work, just because that work was "creative"? Shouldn't the laborers who carried the stones to build a bridge be entitled to an ongoing royalty paid by everyone who crosses?

> The vast majority of human expression was created before the concept of "IP" existed. The business models we've had in the last few hundred years are the aberration, not the other way around.

That's probably not true, for two reasons. The general reason is that most of anything was created recently, due to the exponential growth of human population and society. The specific reason is that copyright was developed hand-in-hand with the technology for creating easily-reproduced works.

> Shouldn't the laborers who carried the stones to build a bridge be entitled to an ongoing royalty paid by everyone who crosses?

There are, of course, toll bridges and roads, including private ones. (The fact that the laborer doesn’t get the payment is a function of the arrangement between the laborer and the person who owns the bridge, not a function of the nature of the property right.)

>There are, of course, toll bridges and roads, including private ones. (The fact that the laborer doesn’t get the payment is a function of the arrangement between the laborer and the person who owns the bridge, not a function of the nature of the property right.)

You mean like publishers and creators?

The automatic status of property rights and protection by both government and industry inherent within the long established framework of IP is very functionally different in nature from a labourer attempting to arrange an adhoc right to payment from future travellers for work they have put into a bridge.

   just because that work was "creative"?

That's where the IP theory all falls down. Originality or uniqueness doesn't exists, creation is all about recreating from what you learned from others. Creation is stealing in a moral and respectful way. Protecting your creations with IP laws is immoral and unrespectful against your public and previous artists you took from

That's a straw man. Copyright doesn't prohibit someone from learning from your work. It prohibits (in the US) five specific acts: reproduction, preparation of derivative works, distribution of copies, public performance, and display. You don't need to be able to define a work of purely unique expression. All you need to be able to do is define when a work is sufficiently original that it's not a derivative work or reproduction.

1. Protecting with IP ¡= Copyright

2. I didn't say Copyright prevents others from learning

3. A work is never sufficiently original, it's always a derivative

>Creators aren't entitled to a "fair" world. Nobody is.

This is psychopathic. Everyone deserves a fair world. That's a huge part of what society is all about. "All men are created equal" is a great thing for a society to aspire to.

I think you're conflating "deserved" with "entitled", when they're not the same at all. Deservedness is more an ideal concerning what one is merited, whereas entitlement is the practical application of "what is yours by legal right". Placing entitlement on intellectual property is - and always has been - a grey area, as there's no physical limitations preventing two people from having a roughly similar idea. There's plenty of limitations preventing two people from owning the same phone, car, or home.

>>Creators aren't entitled to a "fair" world.

>This is psychopathic.

You cannot imagine an interpretation of his words that makes them not psychopathic?

> Shouldn't the laborers who carried the stones to build a bridge be entitled to an ongoing royalty paid by everyone who crosses?

Creators are actually mostly in the same class as the laborers - neither one gets recurring payments, as they've both likely sold the rights to their product for a more immediate payment. The ultimate goal of these laws is to create a formal title that can be bought up by the rent-seeking class.

Skilled stone Masons are paid for the "transaction" of laying stones.

A music streaming "transaction" pays an Artist $0.005, on a good day. Not enough to make a living and sustain cultural values.

> Shouldn't the laborers who carried the stones to build a bridge be entitled to an ongoing royalty paid by everyone who crosses?

If that laborer decided that his works had to be pay that way, sure.

> How is it "fair" that someone should be entitled to profit again-and-again from a single act of work, just because that work was "creative"?

What he does is owned by himself. He shared it with you on a specific terms, that you don't share it with anyone else.

He profit again and again from his single act of work, because that's how he decided to sell it. There's millions that does a work, sell it and are done with it. I do it everyday at work, I do 8 hours of software development and that source code is now the property of the company where I work. That's my choice though.

You're making my point. It's not a matter of "fairness", as the OP was suggesting. It's a matter of market custom. There is no natural law that says that royalty-based payment systems for "intellectual property" work are required. It's a custom.

From your profile “A boring, not-young, not-cool, not-working-at-a-startup IT generalist.”

Do you expect people to pay for your work? Do you voluntarily give your labor away for free? Do you sell software?

I sell my time, by the hour or by the deliverable. I expect to be paid once (and only once) for work I perform. Sometimes I give away my labor for causes I consider worthy. In general, unless I've got a contract that specifies how I'm paid I don't on spec. I don't feel any entitlement to compensation for work performed outside such an agreement.

All work I produce for profit is expressly for-hire and "owned" by the paying Customer. I've got no rights in the products of my work. I've never produced work that my Customers have subsequently licensed or sold, nor would I take on such work. There's plenty of work to do w/o going down that distasteful road.

Any software, writing, photography, music, and other creative endeavors that I've pursued in my personal time and that I have distributed have been permissively licensed or disclaimed to be in the public domain. Fundamentally, I believe an idea can't be "owned". Anything I communicate to others is no longer "mine". It belongs to humanity. Attribution of authorship has a moral component to me (i.e. plagiarism is morally wrong), but making derivative works or exact copies of the works of others isn't wrong. All human expression is derivative.

The current copyright regime in the United States is such a perversion of the original intent that I consider it immoral to participate in it for profit and I have varying degrees of contempt for those people or companies who do. The social contract is skewed too far from the benefit of the public, in favor of the entrenched copyright interests (who, by and large, aren't creators). If the copyright regime were returned to the original term and renewal I might change my opinion, though I still wouldn't participate personally. That would, at least, bring works into the public domain in a sensible time period.

By and large the "entertainment industry" is the object of my ire, because their lobby has been the one seeking to increase copyright terms and to make draconian laws, like the DMCA, to limit individual rights. I think the "tech industry", as we know it, would function in substantially the same manner w/ shorter copyright terms (and w/o software or business process patents-- though that's not really what we're talking about here).

Have I benefited from the current copyright regime? Sure. A lot of the work that I do involves support of non-Free software. Like I said-- if we went back to sensible copyright terms I think the tech industry would be mostly the same.

Perhaps I'm a hypocrite who can't ever be redeemed for working in the tech industry. I was born into the "IP" regime that exists today (at least, prior to the Sonny Bono copyright extension act and the DMCA), but I'm trying to navigate it with the moral compass that I've got.

> When digital replication is easy -- as it is with arts like music or software -- piracy destroys innovation and hurts creators who want to earn a living by selling their creations.

There's no evidence this is true. This is already the world we live in, and creativity is high.

> It's not like the farmers or the apartment owners are going to let people "pirate" a warm place to sleep or a good meal.

I made a specific point that IP is fundamentally different.

> The Grateful Dead, for instance, let people freely copy mix tapes of their concerts and made their money on gate revenues. (They didn't let people in for free. Nope. )

That exactly the point. Monetizing through live shows is already how most music artists make money.

> This creates inefficiencies and it just isn't fair to those who just want to sell their creations without holding a concert or drumming up some other scheme to get people to pay.

It's competition that benefits the consumers of those creations and an opportunity for middle-men to connect creators with consumers (see Patreon). Define "fair" when copyright is often used as a way to censor and steal from smaller creators.

> Most "open source" companies spend endless hours trying to concoct ways to open source just enough of their product while forcing enough people to pay so everyone can eat.

And the outcome is that the public has access to countless sets of open source software alternatives. Which is amazing for users and innovators.

> I've found that most of the people who speak like pitaj are in universities and they make their money through some mixture of outrageous tuition bills that can't be dodged or government funding from taxes that can't be escaped.

Not true for me.

Just on the open-source thread of things, one thing to note is that the "copyleft" regime depends on copyright to work. As do many of the schemes open-source projects use to monetize.

"Stealing from smaller creators" by the big guys isn't a problem I foresee getting smaller in an IP-free world.

> one thing to note is that the "copyleft" regime depends on copyright to work

The idea of copyleft doesn't. The particular implementation in our regulatory reality does, because RMS & others figured out how to hack a system typically used for rent-seeking and restricting innovation (thus lots of parties are investing money to preserve it), and use it for the opposite goal.

Without IP how can you enforce copyleft? Someone could just take your code and modify it and distribute modified binaries without you being able to do anything.

> Without IP how can you enforce copyleft? Someone could just take your code and modify it and distribute modified binaries without you being able to do anything.

You can, for example, reverse-engineer these binaries or develop binary patches (without IP laws, all of this becomes legal).

You wouldn't have to. Without copyright, it seems to me that everything becomes copyleft by default.

I could, for example, modify any piece of software I like, and legally distribute modified copies to others. Even if I didn't want to share my modifications with a larger community (or didn't want to do it for free), I couldn't stop it - someone else could do that for me. And as 'wolfgke points out, being open source doesn't matter much here.

> You wouldn't have to. Without copyright, it seems to me that everything becomes copyleft by default.

No, without copyright, you cannot force the other party to give you access to the original source code.

BTW: There does not seem to exist an open source license that tries to emulate "no copyright"/"no IP". I.e. the license allows reverse engineering of all binaries derived from it virally, create modifications etc. and perhaps allows to use patents; but the license does not give you the right to demand access to the original source code.

You argued upthread for reverse engineering. Binary is the source code, albeit in less convenient form. So maybe it wouldn't be strict copyleft, but close enough.

> Binary is the source code, albeit in less convenient form.

At least the copyleft defenders would not agree.

> Binary is the source code, albeit in less convenient form. So maybe it wouldn't be strict copyleft, but close enough.

Buddy, you must never have worked with a decompiler. To say nothing of the source file structure and comments that are lost along the way.

Instead we get tarball dumps with no change history.

Tarball dumps are OK. The GPL doesn't require change history. Although it can be quite helpful, it would be quite hard to define universally - what level of history is required? It could range from "every character typed" to "changes from the last public release", which is essentially what we have now.

GPL requires source code, which it defines as "the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it."

This prevents release of compilable-but-obfuscated code, or transpiler output, etc., or intentional removal of information required to build the software (though this clause causes GPL-compatibility issues with authenticated-build platforms).

The difference between sifting through tarball dumps and puzzling through binaries is essentially of degree, not kind. If there's a line to draw, perhaps it should have been at "intentional removal of information".

Employees can take source code with them when leaving a company and share it with others.

In the existing legal system you can't. But we could write laws that allow this to be a thing (i.e. instead of the current situation of "you have full control over who can copy/redistribute your IP" it becomes "anyone can copy/redistribute your IP but you are allowed to specify X criteria including the requirement to redistribute source code").

Something contemporary American culture has entirely forgot is the principle of a right to repair.

Even in a post-IP world you can have it be law that anything sold must include its documentation, manuals, and thus in the case of software on the sold product, its source code.

The fact so few realize how grossly unjust it is that most products sold today not only are undocumented but are intentionally obfuscated to make repair nigh impossible in order to drive replacement is the origin of the problem, though.

It's even worse - this is something of a yesterday's problem. We have a growing trend of turning products into services, which not only prevents you from repairing things (which you now don't own), but also restricts ways you can use them and creates an aggressive form of planned obsolescence.

I don't know what this abstract "idea of copyleft" is, but the underlying principle behind the GPL could not be achieved without copyright. The GPL doesn't merely embody some notion of "right to repair" or "right to tinker." Its principle is to put the user on the same level as the original developer. It therefore requires not only source code, but source code in the "preferred form of the work for making modifications to it," plus everything required to build that source code:

> The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it. For an executable work, complete source code means all the source code for all modules it contains, plus any associated interface definition files, plus the scripts used to control compilation and installation of the executable. However, as a special exception, the source code distributed need not include anything that is normally distributed (in either source or binary form) with the major components (compiler, kernel, and so on) of the operating system on which the executable runs, unless that component itself accompanies the executable.

A world where you could freely modify binaries and distribute the results would not provide the same freedoms that are essential to the GPL. Copyright is absolutely necessary to accomplish that goal.

The GPL also embodies the fundamental moral theory of copyright: "I created this thing, so I get to decide the terms on which you use this thing." The GPL doesn't just embody the idea that users should be free to do what they could in a state of nature. It is fundamentally predicated on the idea of enforced reciprocity.

> the underlying principle behind the GPL could not be achieved without copyright. The GPL doesn't merely require you to let other people reverse engineer your binaries, it contemplates that the distributed source code will be in the "preferred form" for working on it. There is no way to enforce that provision without copyright.

Sure there is. The GPL just used copyright as a hack to enforce on a limited basis what the creators explicitly think ought to be a universal obligation not dependent on the use of some upstream content that imposes the rule, for which the natural enforcement mechanism would be for the rules to be in law directly instead of copyright. “Copyleft” essentially implies that—its twisting what proponents see as a bad law into a tool for approximating the nearly diameteically-opposed law they wish existed in its place.

> The GPL doesn't just embody the idea that users should be free to do what they could in a state of nature. It is fundamentally predicated on the idea of enforced reciprocity.

Only because reciprocity is prevented by default through copyright law. In the state of nature, I could not prevent you from modifying my published software, and you couldn't stop me from taking your published modifications and using them, or distributing around. GPL is crafted to create an enclave supported by copyright law, in which things behave similarly to the desired "natural state".

As for source vs. binary thing, I feel that if there were no restrictions on binaries, there would also be no reason to not release source code in the first place. This makes the source code aspect important for real-world GPL, but not necessarily a core issue for a hypothetical copyright-free world.

Your explanation is completely inconsistent with the stated rationales behind the GPL: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html

> A program is free software if the program's users have the four essential freedoms: [1]

> The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0). > The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this. > The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others (freedom 2). > The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

The FSF twice says that having "source code is a precondition" for the freedoms the GPL seeks to protect. And that makes sense. If what you care about is allowing users to "study how the program works" and "change it so it does your computing as you wish," mere freedom to reverse-engineer binaries is insufficient.

Indeed, your interpretation makes the first two freedoms meaningless. It doesn't infringe copyright to reverse-engineer programs for study, or modify them for your own use. You don't need the GPL to enable those freedoms. Those two freedoms only make sense if you read them to mean that users should be able to study and modify the program in the "preferred form" for doing so (i.e. buildable source code).

By "stealing" I meant literally taking their money, not using their art.

Copyleft is a strategy to reach a specific goal in order to address a specific problem. It is not in itself the goal.

In order to ask if copyleft would still be an effective strategy in a non-copyright world we would have to ask if the problem would still exist and how it would look like. Then we would have to compare copyleft to other strategies to see which would be most effective.

Personally I think that if the anti-copyright movement would managed to gain enough political support to remove copyright then copyleft would not be the most effective strategy to gain the goals defined by software freedoms.

Not only plain old copyleft relies on copyright, but also the model of publishing code under the GPL and charging for a commercial license. I have used three such libraries in client work, and I absolutely love this model:

- We can audit software before buying

- We have the ultimate "right to repair"

- Open source/hobby projects can automatically use it for free (SAAS/closed source projects often offer this as well, but there's more friction)

And even if we are not technically required to upstream any patches that we make under the commercial license, the average engineering team will try to keep their downstream patches to a minimum, and the easiest way is to get them merged in the original GPL version.

How would this concept work for authors who write high quality novels?

You can't sustain that model through live performance. You could release books chapter by chapter, and try to fund creation through the Patron model, but that leads to a very different type of product that is honestly inferior.

You can see this in the books that have done well for free on Kindle. Sometimes you want to consume a piece of art that doesn't need to hook the consumer in the opening minutes, and also the artist may need to find a way to fund YEARS of work before producing anything that would entitle them to micro-payments.

Kickstarter.

You think Cormac Mccarthy could have gotten the funds to write Suttree through Kickstarter?

Or honestly even AFTER writing Suttree would have been able to get enough funding to write one of his better books?

I am with pitaj here, intellectual property is fundamentally wrong, but this is a good example of something that I'm not sure would work under no copyright. "Pay what you want" is one way, though I don't have any statistics on if that collects enough money. Another could be selling signed copies or otherwise making some copies exclusive in a way that copying them nullifies. Pay what you want + signed copies + patreon style donations might be enough?

I don't have a good answer to this. I would therefore suggest decreasing the duration of copyright to somewhere around 5-10 years to give the copyright holder time to sell the work with exclusive rights, after which the work enters public domain (like copyright was initially intended to work).

In germany, for a while, there was no copyright on books, so authors faced the same problem.

This was largely solved by selling high quality books as the competition only made cheap books. This seems to have largely worked until newspapers got angry that a small percentage of people read the news without paying.

I think that is just your opinion, it is a different kind of product which has direct feedback from an active readership that is directly funding your product. Leads to less snafus like George RR martin who is ostensibly making a product for readers but is so disconnected from the readership that he thinks 5+ years between books is ok.

http://topwebfiction.com/ is good example of works that are mostly funded by patreon(young adult focused) that sidestep this problem.

If I had a coffee shop, and people were justing taking the coffee without paying for it, yeah, I could probably think of another income stream, like charging for WiFi. But just because I COULD think of another way to make money doesn't mean that I shouldn't be allowed to get paid for the coffee, just because some folks think coffee should be free.

> When digital replication is easy -- as it is with arts like music or software -- piracy destroys innovation and hurts creators who want to earn a living by selling their creations.

The "creation" is the work, which can still be sold. Copies of the work cost nothing and does not make any sense to sell them.

It seems like this is the best way to go, but capitalism's competitive nature is a problem. If a shipping company hires developers to write logistics software, and then everyone has access to the software, the company will have spent money but gained no edge. Same with novels. If everyone can freely print and sell a story, who's the sucker that'll pay the writer?

Of course, I see this as a problem with thr economy. Freely distributing ideas is better for society as a whole than keeping secrets.

Look no further than the Linux kernel for an example of almost every major tech company being invested in the largest software project in history because its in all their individual self interests to not try to reinvent a wheel that big for a competitive advantage.

The prevalence of proprietary kernel drivers likewise lends credence to the value in having forced openness, which would fall under more right to repair than IP for consumers of products hosting software.

You say this with such authority, but you are being naive yourself about the history of arts and economics. The window of history when art was considered "IP" that couldn't exist otherwise is vanishingly small, less than 100 years. Art survived and prospered somehow before IP laws, even after the printing press.

IP is a construct created by capitalism to monetize art and information. It is not a real thing and it is not a necessary thing. People create things just fine without and industrial complex behind them, and if losing that is the cost of all art being accessible to everyone, I am fine with that deal.

> If digital piracy is unchecked, then it forces artists to dream up other ways to make money.

I think you've accurately captured the state of the world for the vast majority of owners of IP who wish to profit from their work. It is extremely rare for royalties to produce any significant percentage of revenues for artists. Most revenue comes from merchandise, live performances, custom work, and so on.

With this in mind, I submit that the actual value of IP in most cases is close to zero.

I think it also must be noted that this would be the case with zero piracy as well. It's not pirates who eat up all the IP revenue, it's the middlemen between the artist and the audience.

It may also be worth considering how value is created by the intermediaries. In the case of, for example, a hit single it's not obvious to me how much of the financial value came from the music itself and how much from the promotion of it.

Which only makes me wonder further if the underlying IP is really valuable or not.

That's a fair point. Come to think of it, hit singles seem to be a lottery - most of the successful ones aren't much different from the unsuccessful ones, except that they reach the threshold of popularity (after which it becomes a positive feedback loop for a while). Spending money on promotion increases the chances of a single to win the lottery.

So I guess I must concede the point. At least in pop music, it could be argued that the value of the work alone is small, and almost all of the value is created by third parties. You gave me something to think about.

Given an IP strong environment, promotion via piracy, either by blatant give away, "free", or by tolerating some piracy can be high value when compared with the cost of promoters.

A few examples:

Official torrent with tip jar, purchase here info included. One could host this torrent too.

Download here page with ads and opportunity to buy, pay what one wants to pay.

Pay for copy, or stream it anytime from our nice server...

Social media, coupled with variations on the above can get word out quickly.

These things, and the many variations on them possible, are of least advantage to the big players, and can be a serious advantage for new, small, up and coming players.

Piracy does not eliminate any sales opportunities. And it can often garner attention where buying that attention can be otherwise costly.

Being relevant opens a lot of potential doors.

> With this in mind, I submit that the actual value of IP in most cases is close to zero.

I heartily endorse this opinion or viewpoint.

After accepting this as true, we must confront why "intellectual property" in the form of taxpayer-funded enforcement of ownership of an idea exists.

Mickey Mouse.

This sounds like a personal attack and I feel your comment would be better without it.

The word you're looking for is a "public good", a good that is non-excludable and non-rivalrous. In economics it is well known that businesses operating in the free market will always underproduce public goods if at all. We've already solved this issue with other public goods like infrastructure and defense, which is to fund it publically.

> ... or government funding from taxes that can't be escaped.

This is bad why? You seem to have issue with the fact that it's being funded in a way that you can't be avoided, but this is true even for private institutions. The truth is that in perfectly competitive markets most companies do not make enough profit to reinvest into research. Most research instead come from near-monopoly markets that have the profits to invest in research. Take for example the development of UNIX at Bell Labs. I doubt anybody living in that era could've avoided telephone charges entirely.

Digital replication is easy and the mass adoption of digital mediums has rendered old business models ineffective. This is called progress. We've created something so great (computing, the internet) that its displaced much of what was before.

The root model is still very much effectual: trade goods and services. If you sell a hardback copy of your book then you can make a margin from people who buy it to have in their offline library. If you perform your music live then you can profit off of your audience. If you open source your software then you can build a company offering consulting around it.

Just think about the amount of advertising and reach that people have access to now. Using your example; giving away a million mix tapes to sell a hundred thousand tickets to your concerts is likely better than selling a thousand mix tapes because no one knows who you are and few want to take a chance.

Say we succeeded in creating a crime free society. Would people be justified in their complaints about the lack of police jobs?

"Digital Piracy" is not a real thing. It's a convention you're advocating for, and one that reasonable people have still not heard a decent argument for adopting.

There absolutely is a thing called a free lunch. In fact their is an album named after it "fat of the land"

I pirate all the time even though I do try and buy the legal options first. When in a lot of cases. Kodi with a couple add-ons take care of the rest. I bought a physical copy of some book but the company drm servers are no longer maintained I'm out of luck. Pirated copies to the rescue. There is an entire generation that was raised to not give a shit about copyright.

I've probably committed five felonies today yet paid once because I'd prefer to do that.

So why bother paying any attention to copyright law? There are zero repercussions.

Piracy is not something that just replaces all forms of paid ownership of digital media.

Piracy is just another competitor on the market; if for the customer the pirated copy provides a better experience at a cheaper price, no IP law will be able to stop the customer from using the better solution. That's capitalism at work.

If you want piracy to stop the solution is simple; provide a better product. Either by providing a better experience (Netflix until recently, Steam) or at a cheaper/equivalent price (Offering your product for free or under an open source license).

The problem with these "many many ways" are that those that tend to work better also tend to be user hostile (subscriptions for things that have no reason to be provided as a service instead of as a product), make the users the products themselves (e.g. advertising), be privacy nightmares (like both the previous examples, at least for the majority of cases), etc.

At the end of the day the plain old "give me money to give you thing" works the best for all parties involved (assuming said parties want to be involved), despite any drawbacks.

Also as a programmer i'm not sure how i'd go about doing a live show :-P

> Also as a programmer i'm not sure how i'd go about doing a live show :-P

I see live coding happening all over Youtube and Twitch.

How many tickets have you bought for live coding shows?

Huh? Tickets are an outdated concept on internet platforms. Space is unlimited and advertising can sustain a channel just fine.

Edit: Medium sized channel.

According to Quora [0], ad revenue from YouTube is about $1 per thousand views. I doubt that programming live streaming is mainstream enough to be sustainable from ads alone.

[0] https://www.quora.com/How-much-does-YouTube-pay-per-1000-vie...

These metrics are totally inaccurate because different verticals pay different CPMs. Some can be much higher, but I've no idea how programming topics fares.

Even if it's 10x that, and one has 10k viewers, $100 is about one or two hours of work at a FAANG. And there's no health care coverage or free lunch for streamers.

Bear in mind that most viewers will see multiple ads during the stream, so 10k viewers could be more like 30k impressions.

Well I wasn't necessarily thinking this was being compared to a full time job, just that a channel could be self supporting, but there are ways to get close:

A strong supplement to ads is direct donations/subscriptions. If you've ever seen a YouTube/Twitch chat, people send a LOT of money that way and get their message highlighted/usually responded to for their money. It's not uncommon to see mid-tier YouTubers make hundreds in one stream but its probably the exception and not the rule.

It's not "tickets," but https://handmadehero.org/watch is live-streamed coding, funded through https://handmadehero.org/fund. I've found it educational and entertaining, and is an example of a programmer doing a "live show."

Quite a few if you include such content being bundled together with other content into a conference.

Well... I've seen a particularly aggressive company use their IP to kill competitors.

You can't make a specific file format without using this company.

It seems any free or low cost competitor gets bought by them.

It's made the CAD world horrible.

subscriptions for things that have no reason to be provided as a service instead of as a product), make the users the products themselves

It seems to be working okay for YouTube and Twitch content creators. By monetizing via donations, Patreon patronage, and Twitch subscriptions, creators form a closer and more direct relationship with their audience. Twitch streamers especially are rewarded for engaging directly with people in chat.

For programmers it's different. Your best bet is to get paid by a company to work on proprietary business software, which can be highly specialized to the company and protected by trade secrets.

Entertainment seems to be swinging back to being primarily a service business, after a relatively short period as a hit-driven product business. It's not uncommon to hear a fan talking about buying a product specifically to support the creator.

> It's not uncommon to hear a fan talking about buying a product specifically to support the creator.

A consideration: Could a reason for this also be that people do want to avoid that their money goes to "evil media companies" who will use this money to fight against them (think DRM, think anti-consumer legislation etc.)?

It's not uncommon to hear a fan talking about buying a product specifically to support the creator.

And that sentiment is great, but while it's not unusual, it's certainly not the view that most people take. If even 10% of the people who like our stuff on social media and enjoy using the free versions actually paid even for the cheapest one-off purchase or shortest subscription to support the creators, I'd be writing to you from great hall of my palace right now.

Trade secrets are protected only by intellectual property regimes, and we're talking about a world without intellectual property.

> Trade secrets are protected only by intellectual property regimes, and we're talking about a world without intellectual property.

Not in Germany. In Germany, there exists a class of criminal acts that are subsumed unter the umbrella term "Geheimnisverrat" (secret betrayal), which also includes revealing trade secrets:

> https://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Geheimnisverrat&o...

That's still just enforcement of intellectual property.

> That's still just enforcement of intellectual property.

No, in German law, this is a completely different criminal offence.

Ah, I see, so we could abolish IP law by renaming it to Conditionally Shared Secrets and keeping all provisions the same? No, that would be ridiculous. The concept of intellectual property is obviously unaffected by the implementation of the enforcement regime.

> Ah, I see, so we could abolish IP law by renaming it to Conditionally Shared Secrets and keeping all provisions the same?

I will try to explain it to you again: the purpose of all the criminal offences that are subsumed under "Geheimnisverrat" in German law is to punish leaking confidential information (e.g. trade secrets).

For example, a movie that is available on a BluRay disc, is not confidential because you can easily buy it. Thus, copying a BluRay disc etc. is does not belong under the umbrella term "Geheimnisverrat" because the content of the BluRay disc is not confidential data, but copyrighted.

Thus, in German law, Urheberrechtsverletzung (roughly and often translated with "copyright violation", though not identical) and Geheimnisverrat (secret betrayal) are very different criminal acts.

My point is that it's still intellectual property even if it isn't copyright, because it says that you can hold on to secrets and that secrets are protected like property.

Go back to the beginning of the thread:

> "Intellectual property" is fundamentally different from classical property because information is not an exclusive good. If I hold an apple, you cannot hold the same apple, but we can both hold a digital copy with the same information.

The same thing applies to these secrets. It's just a subtype of intellectual property. In the US, too, trade secrets and copyright violation are handled under different sections of the law. They are different acts, just like in Germany (hence the different name - copyright vs. trade secret).

But they're both intellectual property and the arguments against work against both.

Changing the legal framework around intellectual property doesn't stop it from being intellectual property.

> Changing the legal framework around intellectual property doesn't stop it from being intellectual property.

As I wrote under https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20811544 "Geheimnisverrat" applies to leaking confidential data (e.g. trade secrets, but not copyrighted works that are publicly available).

Intellectual property does not mean 'copyright', it broadly refers to any sort of creation that isn't physical in nature. Trade secrets are legally enforced differently than copyright in the United States as well, but they are both forms of intellectual property.

No, they're also protected by contract law. I don't think anyone who opposes intellectual property law is opposed to contract law. Non-disclosure agreements are widespread and straightforward. Why would we need extra protection specifically for trade secrets?

Patreon is a huge example of this model working very well in the online creator space. Music artists already make the majority of their income from live shows.

The solution to "subscriptions for things that have no reason to be provided as a service instead of as a product" is just trusting that people will pay if they like your product, or creating alternatives in the open-source space. Which will be much easier if you can rightfully use prior work. Your other concerns already exist, so at the worst we just have what we already have.

> Also as a programmer i'm not sure how i'd go about doing a live show :-P

You may be surprised. Many programmers do live-coding sessions as they work on open source products.

Yes, many programmers do live-coding sessions, but how many are making money doing it (and enough to live from that)?

I do livecoding a lot. It’s a great way to build and audience, do branding, etc.

You absolutely need to then do something to monetize said audience. Selling a course is the common model. But that’s selling access to information which is what we’re trying to argue against here.

I have also been pleasantly surprised that you can sell access to a livecoding series. That’s sort of like tickets to a live show.

Workshops are another form of a live programming show that people will pay money for. Have also done those and it’s a lot of fun.

Most paid forms of these are in exchange for teaching. Access to intellectual property in your brain.

>Workshops are another form of a live programming show that people will pay money for.

I know there are training companies that charge.

You also have workshops as part of paid conferences but I assume the vast bulk of those workshops are done for free by people being paid by their employer. And Meetups are usually free with the same people from companies along with those showing off or promoting some side project.

I agree with your general point around teaching/training. It's just that you're competing with a lot of free content, often subsidized by some company's product sales.

> Music artists already make the majority of their income from live shows

This is out of necessity, not necessarily because of the desire to do so. Not every musician wants to tour 300 days a year just to make a living. Writing music and performing music are not the same thing.

I'm sure there are some programmers capable of doing good work while keeping up a steady stream of banter, but many of us are quiet and don't want to have cameras peeking over our shoulders or staring in our faces.

Besides, turning my profession into a sharecropping existence on Twitch/YouTube/Patreon, choosing to either be a living ad banner or a mendicant, holds absolutely no appeal for me.

> At the end of the day the plain old "give me money to give you thing" works the best for all parties involved (assuming said parties want to be involved), despite any drawbacks.

This is the heart of it for me. All the new monetization models developed in the last 20 years suck. I don't want software as a service, I don't want freemium, I certainly don't want to be the product for ad-supported software. All I want is to pay you for the thing and get the thing and then for you to leave me alone until you release a new version of the thing.

What about software maintenance as a service?

Most of the decent software I’ve seen lately has used this model of monetization.

Would you say the current balance is correct?

I don't think I'd go as far as the op, but the current arrangement is causing me to lose respect for the whole setup.

IP should be there to enable people to make more stuff and no more. It seems that we should be testing how minimalistic we can make it, not how maximalistic, as is currently the case.

The blurred lines case isnt going to result in more music being made, it's going to result in less, Marvin Gaye isnt going to make another album, because he's dead.

I would guess for low overhead type things a 5 year copyright term wouldn't result in less music being produced, and it shouldn't be down to me to prove that, it should be down to whoever wants longer copyright terms to prove that that will result in more content being created.

> The problem with these "many many ways" are that those that tend to work better also tend to be user hostile (subscriptions for things that have no reason to be provided as a service instead of as a product), make the users the products themselves (e.g. advertising), be privacy nightmares (like both the previous examples, at least for the majority of cases), etc.

Public money and grants avoid all of these problems. In my view, we should dramatically expand public funding for technology and the arts, especially in a world where distribution is nearly free.

In my view, we should dramatically expand public funding for technology and the arts, especially in a world where distribution is nearly free.

But then we need a way to decide what is or is not worthy of funding.

The effect of copyright is to create a market-based approach to this, where something similar to the familiar economics of trading goods allows us to direct money to those who provide value.

A move to publicly funded creative works would prompt the kind of debates we have today about public service broadcasters in particular and about pork barrel politics in general, but on a scale several orders of magnitude larger. I find it hard to imagine how that could possibly be as effective as what we have today. The power wielded by the gatekeepers of taxpayer-funded financial support would be immense and inevitably deeply corrosive.

> Also as a programmer i'm not sure how i'd go about doing a live show :-P

I think the best-fit to the analogy here is when you make an app for one particular customer instead of for the general public.

But why would anyone then pay you to develop that app? They would need a business model of their own that doesn't rely on selling it, or maybe some other form of locked-down ecosystem where it is physically difficult to reproduce it even if it were legal to do so.

If the app is just a way into some other paid-for service, that could work OK. It would be similar to businesses contributing to OSS that is available at no charge today because they build related services that they do charge for. But this sort of model only works for a subset of the valuable apps produced today.

So, like websites? A surprising number of the apps I’ve worked on had websites with similar features.

Don’t get me wrong, some things may be well suited to the current model: a hiking GPS needs good maps, good maps are expensive to make, that expense is currently recovered with copyright licenses… but even then the best maps seem to be from the government, e.g. Ordinance Survey in the UK, and that app development could easily be nationalised and funded from taxation the way all NASA’s output is.

the plain old model has historically been full of exceptions in order to make it work. Copyright used to expire, you had libraries as an solution to written words and people could do public performance without asking for permission.

Then in the last 30-40 years all those exceptions and escape vales for the plain old method of copyright was either made obsolete or amended away. Copyright does not expire in any meaningful way, public libraries holds only a marginal amount of all the copyrighted works, public performance got locked down, and so on.

The old "give me money to give you thing" worked fined in the old times with old time copyright and society. It work crappy in current time with current copyright and current society. Thus people are rushing to find a new better way.

As a programmer we could go back to 1790 old copyright law and still have a job. Even the game industry would survive fine on it.

This post lacks counterfactual reasoning. The question around IP law isn't if it's possible for creative work to be created without it, which is obviously true, but what creative works would be created (and what creative works would not be created) if IP law didn't exist.

Is your claim that the set of creative works we have today would exist in full without IP law? Because that is a bold claim, and rather easily refutable through any single example where a company's primary competitive advantage hinges upon IP rights. Potential examples abound.

You can argue that the tradeoffs in IP law are not good tradeoffs. But your post seems to think that there would be no tradeoff -- that simply we'd get all the benefits conferred to society (in the form of creative works), with none of the downsides, if we eliminated IP protections. The burden of proof is on you for that one, since I'm sure if you surveyed any company relying upon IP protections in any non-trivial way, they'd indicate that capital would have been allocated elsewhere if not for those protections.

I'm glad someone has said this, it's one thing to want the IP law altered but to assume that nothing would change if IP law didn't exist seems naive.

> The question around IP law isn't if it's possible for creative work to be created without it, which is obviously true, but what creative works would be created (and what creative works would not be created) if IP law didn't exist.

Those are bad questions, and unanswerable on all accounts. They also don't help us because then we have to compare the subjective values of creations to pick which is better, which is impossible since it varies person-to-person. One question we could ask is "How much money flows from a consumers to creators under both systems?" That question is still hard to answer, but at least the answer would have meaning.

> Is your claim that the set of creative works we have today would exist in full without IP law?

I don't claim that everything would be the same without IP laws. However, I certainly think it would be better if they didn't exist.

> rather easily refutable through any single example where a company's primary competitive advantage hinges upon IP rights. Potential examples abound.

It doesn't really matter but I am curious what companies you're referring to that aren't acting as parasitic rent-seeking middlemen.

> You can argue that the tradeoffs in IP law are not good tradeoffs. But your post seems to think that there would be no tradeoff -- that simply we'd get all the benefits conferred to society (in the form of creative works), with none of the downsides, if we eliminated IP protections.

I don't see any evidence that lifting IP protections will result in a decrease in quantity or quality of creative works as a whole.

> The burden of proof is on you for that one, since I'm sure if you surveyed any company relying upon IP protections in any non-trivial way, they'd indicate that capital would have been allocated elsewhere if not for those protections.

Let's make it clear what you're advocating for: continued state action that benefits a minority of the population at the expense of consumers by providing the members of that minority with an artificially enforced monopoly on information.

Your argument is the status quo fallacy. Just because something currently exists, does not mean I have the burden of proof. In fact, it is you who must prove that IP is beneficial. I cannot prove a negative (that IP is not necessary or beneficial) and asking me to do so is irrational. That's like asking abolitionists to prove that slavery isn't necessary for the economy. (Sorry for the inflammatory example but it's what came to mind)

I don't see any evidence that lifting IP protections will result in a decrease in quantity or quality of creative works as a whole.

Well, there are millions of people working in creative industries today whose income ultimately derives from selling that creative work under the current IP regime. If removing IP protections is not to result in reduced output, some alternative model must either continue to provide the same incentive for the same people to do that work or provide a sufficient incentive so that others produce at least the equivalent output.

I would argue that many alternative models have been tried in recent years, and that in most cases there is no inherent reason that they could not succeed immediately if they created a more effective incentive than the existing IP regime just because we have that regime operating in parallel. And yet so far, I see little evidence that any known alternative has actually done that. There are some isolated success stories, and even those typically don't raise anything like as much funding as the the top tier of works funded through more traditional models.

But that minority of the population is the only group contributing any value here. What you're advocating for is everyone being able to benefit from the work of others without any obligation to give anything back. That might cut it when we're living in a fully automated utopian paradise where money is obsolete and no-one has to work for a living, but until then, the people contributing that value also have bills to pay and families to feed.

When a company's existence hinges on IP ownership, works are blocked from creation - almost by definition. Literally what IP law does, is prevent creation from outside of monopolies.

The various content industries already had to move to models that assume everything will be pirated since its so common and accepted.

For some the result was not bad. Even good (Spotify and co are pretty cool, at least for a casual user like myself).

Some were downright awful. Games with DRM, always online requirements, decline of AAA quality single player game (at least proportionally) and user hostile monetization (micro transaction).

In a magical world where we actually had enforceable IP/piracy laws, but reasonable IP terms, I wonder how different things would be. Some stuff would likely be worse. Some would likely be better. But for sure things would be very different.

A magical world where such laws can be enforceable would be the same world where people have less freedoms than slaves ever had, as enforcing copyright is fundamentally incompatible with most freedoms.

Let me ask. If you had to make a choice between "obeying copyright laws (where copyright is granted for 7 years, no more and fair use clauses are a thing), or being a literal slave (by the definition most people think of when you use that term), you'd pick the latter?

Sorry, I call bullshit and gross exaggeration.

Intellectual "property" should, at least, be a controversial form of "property." Starting with the fact that the clause in the US constitution that gave us patent and copyright exclusivity for a limited term doesn't contain the word "property." The word is tendentious.

It's a weak right, if it is one: The term of exclusivity is set by statute. Imagine real property rights having a fixed term defined by the whim of Congress. Indeed imagine any right needing to be enumerated, explicitly, and then thrown to Congress to set a time limit on it.

Nonetheless the Framers thought it worth putting in the Constitution and so we have a duty to keep this right from being controlled by big publishing interests, big pharma, etc. (also not mentioned in the Copyright Clause, just authors and inventors).

Indexing the term of copyright exclusivity to US life expectancy, for example, might make us think harder about a range of national policies.

> Intellectual property" is fundamentally different from classical property because information is not an exclusive good. If I hold an apple, you cannot hold the same apple, but we can both hold a digital copy with the same information.

That’s one difference, sure. But another difference is that intellectual property must be created by people, while other kinds of property often are created naturally. Somebody had to make Harry Potter. My yard was just there naturally. Why shouldn’t the property right in Harry Potter be stronger than that for land? Why is one kind of difference dispositive and the other not?

Your yard was not there naturally, unless you call a section of untouched forest "your yard".

Every piece of property must be improved by labor in some way. That is how property is created in the first place: homesteading involves investing your labor into untouched land to own it, as one example.

No, that's not true. Real estate can be purchased and owned, resold over and over without being improved by labor. Land property is not created by laboring on it, in fact it was always there.

Yes, that's true, even if the "improvement" is merely to define property lines and locations. If property lines aren't there, it effectively doesn't exist. I mean, yes, some chunk of continental crust exists, but it's not "property" if you can't define it.

If you completely redefine "improvement" and "labor" then sure.

> No, that's not true. Real estate can be purchased and owned, resold over and over without being improved by labor.

The initial labor is what creates the property. It can then be traded and whatnot. But it was not property before the initial labor that transformed wild land to something useful.

> Land property is not created by laboring on it, in fact it was always there.

There is much untouched land on the moon. Who owns that?

Land exists before improvement, but it is not property until improved through labor by people. That's just how the property rights on which our civilization is based work.

> There is much untouched land on the moon. Who owns that?

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Moon_Treaty&oldid...

Exactly physical land exists, and the only "labor" required for it to be property is for people to agree on it being property. How does this constitute real labor or improvement?

Intellectual properties are generally more creative based endeavors and should be protected as such IMO

That's what nonsensical libertarian dogma insists, sure, but that pseudo-religious tripe has no relation to or bearing on reality.

Property is created when someone uses force to claim ownership of something. That's it. Anything else is post-hoc justification for said claim. You can indeed own that untouched forest if you can hold it with force. That's the ultimate basis of property, no matter how libertarians try to mask it: the imposition of force on the existing natural world to create artificial division of ownership.

Please don't call names in arguments or take HN threads further into ideological flamewar. It just makes discussion tediouser and nastier.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> That suggests that intellectual property is even more deserving of protection than at least natural property

No, you suggested this out of nothing. It actually suggests the opposite, because protecting "intellectual property" takes away the freedom from other people to create it themselves as if they are somehow less deserving of something they created because they weren't the first ones to get that protection.

At least in the context of copyright, independent creation of something is not infringement.

> At least in the context of copyright, independent creation of something is not infringement.

The lines what is really counts as "independent" are deeply blurred.

You can say this, but it's not really true. Courts have sliced away at the "independent creation" aspect until it exists in theory but not in practice.

Courts have limited the degree to which you can leverage pre-existing characters, etc., but if you truly create your own thing without relying on the work of others, incidental similarity will not result in infringement. (Of course, incidental similarity might be evidence that you actually copied, instead of independently creating the work.)

It still has to go to trial to be determined. This is used as a punitive mechanism by prominent rightsholders. See the sad tales of Prenda Law, and Rightshaven. I'm not sure what the official term is in the case of "we assume X, but we'll have a trial to see if X is true", but the presumption is that whatever was copied, so it has to go to court. In combination with the "American Rule", that makes everyone shy away from coming too close to copying. You can lawyerly say what you want, the situation is that theoretically you can invent something yourself that's close or identical to some rightholder's ideas, but basically you're punished for it. SO stay away.

It is not a foregone conclusion that the universe must have a Harry Potter series of YA novels in it. Nor is it required that if such a series exists, that they be exactly as they were written. In our universe, we have seven books of Harry Potter, following an archetypal plot arc.

There is no particular reason we should believe that if Harry Potter did not exist, there would be nothing similar enough to Harry Potter to serve as close substitute. Kids could have gone nuts for Barry Brassgears, the steampunk airship cabin-boy that ultimately grows in knowledge and ability to defeat Max Clanks, the industrialist bent on clearing the skies of all independent captains. Or maybe they could have latched on to Sirene Ceta, the young mermaid adventuress who stumbles into a scheme by landswoman Gail Greywave to seize control over the Pacific salmon runs, and foils it. I just made these up, but anyone can write an automated generator to spit out these pitches.

Without the copyright-based business, the type and the quality of the popular stories change, but they still get written. The problem becomes discoverability, because it is harder to make money by promoting someone else's work. More promotion creates more copies, but you can no longer monetize the copies directly. You only have author goodwill and branding to work with.

>intellectual property is an invalid form of ownership and shouldn't exist at all....If I hold an apple, you cannot hold the same apple, but we can both hold a digital copy with the same information.

What if you manufacture a computer under a company you name Apple, and manufacture/sell computers under the mark "Apple" and even have a "Apple logo."

Do you believe other companies should be able to infringe on your name, mark and logo?

What if other manufacturers are attempting to decieve the public by trading off the good will and value you built in the name? What if other manufacturers are purposefully flooding the market with cheap knock offs of your machines and the public can't tell the difference, so they stop buying your machines and the value of your company/brand goes down to zero?

It's all a matter of who you (or customers) want to trust. In the case you mentioned, we'll need better way to source what material / virtual content is produced by whom and where.

Trademark is pretty different from copyright and patents. This is because claiming to be another party or claiming your product is their product is fraud.

That's not what grandparent claimed, though. "Intellectual property" is an umbrella term for copyright, trademarks, patents, design protection laws, etc. throwaway_law's retort seems justified to me.

I am the grandparent. I should have excluded trademark when I referred to IP but let me make it completely clear. By IP I am referring to copyright and patents.

There is within reason just cause to criticize trademark as it is exists now from an IP abolitionists perspective - trademarks are often liberally given out for nebulous concepts and the process of overturning a generic trademark is, like almost anything related to legal proceedings, outside the purview of most average people.

The act of trying to deceive people through imitation of another product should fall plainly under a better written statute against impersonation, slander, and deceptive advertising. You shouldn't be registering trademarks or having the bureaucracy associated - all you need to do is sue someone you think is trying to mislead in imitating your branding under such expanded laws to get them to stop.

Because inevitably it comes down to the interpretations of people on who is the "real" product, whatever it name may be. Trademark registration gives you a date to go by but that doesn't guarantee use of the name or nuance about presentation aside the trademark. It still ends up being in front of a judge even with a trademark in hand, and like with all the IP offices of government the trademark office is usually understaffed, overworked, and not capable of accurately auditing all incoming requests for brand protection or to verify issued trademarks are being used for their intended purpose.

The primary reason for the original creation of 'letters patent' is to prevent all of human knowledge from being hidden behind trade secrets. We can debate how long, or in what form patents should be granted. There are many inefficiencies in the current system, but granting patents is a useful government endeavor because it requires the party who wishes to receive the patent to publicly disclose their discovery in which they want patented. You should consider this before you throw out patents as a non-useful feature. It is hard to have a conversation about IP in general when Trademarks, Patents, and Copyright vary so highly.

>Trademark is pretty different from copyright and patents.

Trademark is intellectual property, you stated:

>intellectual property is an invalid form of ownership and shouldn't exist at all

>This is because claiming to be another party or claiming your product is their product is fraud.

It would not be fraud, it would be infringement of intellectual property.

But what is the practical difference if you manufacture/sell computers under your mark/logo, or if you are an author selling your book and I begin reproducing your book and selling it to the public? What if I begin reproducing Harry Potter original works or even create my own Harry Potter works and adopt the authors copyright pen name?

My opinions used to be similar to yours. The current copyright regime in the US, as well as the application of patents to software and "business processes", both feel like abuses and perversions of the original intent of US patent and copyright law.

Having said that, I've become a bit more pragmatic over time. I can see value in limited-time monopolies being granted by statute. (Can you imagine the wacky alternatives that private individuals and companies would write into contracts if "IP" law didn't exist?) Limited-time, being a major sticking-point with me, and something that really needs to fixed under the current US copyright regime.

> (Can you imagine the wacky alternatives that private individuals and companies would write into contracts if "IP" law didn't exist?)

There are countless examples of trade secrets that exists in this exact state. These things are already in employment contracts.

Yeah, software patents are absolutely awful.

Source code is like a written recipe, you absolutely should be able to copyright it. But you shouldn't be able to patent it. All software patents do is encourage lawsuits and trolling.

> Source code is like a written recipe, you absolutely should be able to copyright it.

But you can’t copyright recipies, AFAIK.

Not to mention that legal "damages" for IP piracy has an upper bound of infinity. Some fixed "cost" multiplied by the number of times you seeded the file, and how many times your peers seeded the file to their peers, etc.

I'm suspicious of this argument. If you don't have any intellectual property laws, can't anyone just duplicate all of those methods you mentioned? If Marvel releases a movie, I can steal it and ask people to subscribe to my stolen movie service, donate to it, show it using advertisements, write a live show using the script, etc. About the only way I can't steal it is through commission, but then how is the person paying the commission getting their money back? This seems like it wouldn't work.

I suppose you don't need IP to have contracts that prevent redistribution... I'm not sure that's what OP is going for though.

If only there was some system to sort of implicitly grant creators the ability to control who gets to redistribute their works. Like if they had some sort of rights on what their intellect has produced.

But what would we call it?

Creators don't have exclusive control over their past works, but they do have control over their future works. That is how those monetization strategies work.

> If Marvel releases a movie, I can steal it and ask people to subscribe to my stolen movie service, donate to it, show it using advertisements, write a live show using the script, etc

Yes, you can do that. But you don't have access to that movie until it's released, so Marvel can sell release access to theaters and streaming services. They can crowd-fund new movies by selling exclusive early access to the final product. They can sell merchandise and other media that integrates with the movie. Perhaps they can sell super-high-quality physical media for collectors.

Obviously people are willing to pay money to see these movies. The questions is how to connect Marvel with that money, which I'm sure they can figure out.

> About the only way I can't steal it is through commission, but then how is the person paying the commission getting their money back?

Artists selling their services for commission is mostly seen for smaller works of art, like paintings / drawings or short animations.

> There is no evidence that intellectual property is necessary for innovation or creative endeavors.

Just ask yourself if Avengers - if the entire franchise of Marvel movies - would have been made if not for IP protections that allowed the costs of making those movies to be recouped; that allowed those movies to be profitable for the investors.

Ask yourself if we would have all the books we currently have from Steven King (or George R.R. Martin, or Stan Lee, or any other commercially popular author) if copyright (a form of IP protection) did not exist.

The answer is "No".

There are a few options for people to put their work up for free online, but if you've read or watched those, you realize that the quality is nowhere near a professionally written and edited novel or a movie with millions of post-production work budget.

Shakespeare, Gilgamesh, The Iliad, Romance of the 3 Kingdoms, Journey to the West... there's an absolutely endless treasure trove of content created without IP laws.

They were largely purchased by nobility, or by large theaters (in turn supported by nobility). Copying a book or play was also effectively impossible (months to years of painstaking manual work) in those periods of time, granting strong exclusivity to the purchasers.

It wasn't until later, sometimes centuries later, that these became broadly available to everyone.

So I guess, how much of an advance are you willing to give Steven King (or your favorite author) to write a novel for the world?

There's a contradiction here. Above you're saying that if it wasn't paid for by mass media, it wouldn't be made.

Then you're saying stuff was paid for by a rich patron.

Are you suggesting that patrons would not have stuff made if weren't exclusive?

It's worth remembering that exactly that is what happened. Rich guy paid for a thing, everyone got use of it. Some of the top works of history were created like this, and it bears consideration whether the corporations who make things for profit are as good at creating such works.

It's not mass media who's paying for it, it's investors who are expecting a return on their monetary investment. Or, put another way, the people paying to have these movies and books made today have zero interest in the books and movies themselves, only the money to be made from their sale.

A patron, in comparison, is a single entity who is interested in the book, and who is capable of shelling out the $50,000 (a nice round number representing the salary for a good, but not great, writer and editor for the duration of getting the book produced) to have that book made. I'm not capable of doing that; I am guessing most people are not.

> it bears consideration whether the corporations who make things for profit are as good at creating such works

That's up to each person to decide. Is GRRM's Game of Thrones such a work? The Dark Tower series? Avengers Infinity War and Endgame?

Honestly, I think that yes, in many ways they are on par with or superior to books such as the Illiad and the Odyssey. They are absolutely better than Moby Dick.

But doesn't one mode of creation exclude the other? How many patrons will pay to have something made in the current world, knowing they could just recoup their money? I think you could even argue that patrons would care more, because who wants to be the guy who creates crap? Versus the current "if they think it's good enough, I guess everyone's happy" attitude.

It seems to me that content will get created regardless. Whether it's better is as you say a matter of taste, but both worlds have existed.

You can't be serious that Avengers is on par with the epics.

IMO, the epics are epics because of when they were written, not because of the content. Avengers: Endgame moved me to tears by killing off a character I had grown to love. The Odyssey? No tears. No attachment to the characters. Less entertainment.

> How many patrons will pay to have something made in the current world, knowing they could just recoup their money?

How could they recoup their money, if there's no exclusivity? There's nothing to sell.

> It seems to me that content will get created regardless.

I guess ultimately, there is absolutely nothing stopping people in today's from creating the best content they possibly could, except for having to cover their cost of living. Today's IP protections allow them to cover their cost of living by creating content. A lack of IP protections means that creation will always be a second or lower priority to a vast majority of creators (those not sponsored by a patron)

To me, that means that a world that lets them create as a method of covering their cost of living is a better world for those creators.

Your Avengers example is terrible. Those movies made all of their money from theater ticket sales, not Blu-Rays after the fact.

Consumers spent money on the theater experience because it was the best way to see the movie when they wanted to see it.

Timed releases for content are fine, but if I buy a disk after the fact, I want to be able to copy it freely without DRM and jumping through stupid hurdles.

Why spend money to watch it in the theater, if you can legally get a copy of it online? Without IP protections, any theater employee could legally create a copy of the film (not to mention the audience) and distribute it.

There's no audience participation in Avengers, and with today's home AV setups, there's little benefit to the theater environment; there's no incentive to pay to watch something that will be freely and legally available in a day or two (at most).

> Why spend money to watch it in the theater, if you can legally get a copy of it online? Without IP protections, any theater employee could legally create a copy of the film (not to mention the audience) and distribute it.

That already happens with a lot of movies where the movie is leaked (even sometimes before it lands in the cinema) and it does not seem to change anything to the theater results.

Because capturing and viewing those is not legal, and not simple. Have no doubt that the legality matters, since it incentivizes making the viewing simpler (imagine popcorn time having devs who could openly work on it without fear of being legally prosecuted).

>The answer is "No".

As the statement you quoted said, there is no evidence that this is the case.

Those movies made back their investment despite piracy, why would the removal of those IP protections change that? Many authors have not become commercially popular for much of their career but still wrote. How can you claim those books only exist because of copyright?

Only because the illegality of piracy increased the friction of viewing the illegal copies (not to mention a history of legal action against parties who view said copies). Make copying legal and the friction would all but vanish (think popcorn time with many more active devs and no legal push to get it taken down), making it easier to watch at home than to watch at the theater.

The theater offers very few practical enhancements to the viewing of a movie that aren't available in your average home theater system.

>Only because the illegality of piracy increased the friction of viewing the illegal copies

Evidence of this extremely bold claim?

Your idea of the "average home theatre" may be a bit exaggerated, particularly out of the Western market.

How exactly are these popcorn time variants acquiring high quality copies of the film in a quick time frame?

You're saying that as if Marvel movies are some kind of pinnacle of creativity and quality.

In fact, an argument could be made using those same movies as an example, that these excessive IP laws have the exact opposite effect and actually end up stunting creativity and originality as the big corporations aim to milk every last penny from decades old franchises and ideas, instead of seeking new and original concepts, because the former is a far more profitable endeavor. I mean, look at the state of Hollywood right now - when was the last time you saw a truly novel and noteworthy movie, not based on an already established franchise/idea/series?

What's better - high quality and enjoyable, but derivative entertainment, or a substantial drop in the amount of available entertainment?

Have no doubt, even truly creative works would suffer, since there's no incentive for investors to invest even in truly creative work, since there's no monetary return on investment - just a movie which they can't monetize.

Imagine if George RR Martin had to hold a day job in addition to writing - how many books would he have actually written by this point?

I'd say that the abundance of (arguably) high quality derivative content is the worse option. Mostly because the alternative to that is not necessarily a lack of choice.

In my experience, in recent years I've found to enjoy lot more independently produced content (which either happens to be free or very cheaply available) as opposed to big budget titles produced by big corporations. Not because I actively seek such content, but because I genuinely find it to be more worthwhile and enjoyable than the other option.

Now I can't really speak for motion pictures, because I don't watch tv shows and movies anymore - but I can definitely say this is very true for the music and video game industries - big investment and quality are not correlated.

Isn't it wonderful that both options are available today? You remove IP, you remove an option. Perhaps that doesn't hurt you, but there are quite a few people who appreciate that they can get the output from commercial creators at low prices.

If IP laws didn't exist, you wouldn't have to make due with the unimaginative pandering garbage Disney deigns to think up. You would be able to tell, share, and transform, movies. That is a vastly better world.

Nor world it cost so much to make movies, because the best way to do that, including the best software and hardware design, would belong to everyone.

If it took you three billion dollars and five years to conceptualize an apple that cured something, and suddenly it was commonwealth, nobody would look for apples that cured something, and we'd go back to the dark ages. Ideologies must be evaluated on what they functionally incentivize in a society - and this proposition makes R&D investment equivalent to financial suicide.

Abolishing patents is radical enough to begin with, so why stop there? If everyone had UBI and free healthcare to cover the material costs of living, is it really so implausible that people who were interested in looking for apples that cured something would do so?

That aside, the obvious answer would be to publicly fund this kind of activity that we deem beneficial to society.

> If it took you three billion dollars and five years to conceptualize an apple that cured something, and suddenly it was commonwealth, nobody would look for apples that cured something

This can be solved by government grants, a high but still normal VAT on all medicine purchases is enough to cover all our current medicine research costs, you'd just have to earmark it.

All concepts of ownership are human constructs. We have copyright because of its utility, not for some analogy to conventional ownership in law.

> There are many many ways to monetize creation including but not limited to subscription, donation, live shows, advertisement, and commission.

I don't see anyone making high-budget movies under any revenue models other than as-a-product and as-a-service, both of which fail in the absence of copyright.

> There is no evidence that intellectual property is necessary for innovation or creative endeavors.

Given that whole industries are based on copyright, I rather think the onus is on you to make the case that getting rid of it wouldn't be ruinous.

I see no reason Intellectual Property shouldn't exist, it however shouldn't extend indefinitely, problem is - it basically now extends well beyond the time it should, and casts a huge net over stuff that has little to no commercial value, and no obvious ownership.

> There are many many ways to monetize creation including but not limited to subscription, donation, live shows, advertisement, and commission.

But then it would be legal to duplicate it and thus you can remove paid subscription and paid live shows from your possibilities.

What's remains is ads/commission that you do block (the internet never forget [0]).

Donations then should be the only way to make content? That seems quite bad...

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20205076

What about Plagiarism though? That's the main point of intellectual property. If someone writes a song and it's really good. It's about the artist's life, full of personal stuff that only that artist could think of. It's this artist's master piece. But then a more popular artists decides to steal it and makes it becomes more successful. The more popular artist doesn't owe anything to the original creator?

I think IP is definitely abused, but still a lot of cases were it can protect people.

If somebody makes a better version then good for them.

Would you feel the same if it was you or your friend who had their life's work stolen? Would you be alright watching someone make a fortune off of your work and not even acknowledge they owe you?

Do not mix copyright with IP. Copyright is useful for artists.

That’s not plagiarism. Plagiarism is is passing off someone else’s work as your own.

The bounds or plagiarism have no ties to the legal bounds of what is or isn’t copyright infringement. You can have either one without the other, or both at the same time.

In my scenario the more popular artist is pretending to be the original creator and stealing their work. But imagine any plagiarism scenario. Someone republishing Harry Potter under their name for instance.

How can you prosecute someone for plagiarism without copyright laws?

Is this not the same situation if someone were to plagiarise a public domain (i.e. no copyright) work now?

That’s called “fraud”. It has nothing to do with copyright.

Kill copyright. Curtail patent. Keep trademark.

In the absence of government-enforced monopoly, I think the next-best alternative for creatives would be to cartelize, trading new content for subscription fees covering a range of convenience services related to creative content, such as a recommendations engine, discoverability, favorites library, notifications, artist-specific storefronts, &c.

Pay $10/month or $100/year to the cartel, and from that, the cartel pays its participating artists a guaranteed stipend for living expenses, bonuses for each new work added to the cartel's library, a bonus for each work that meets a positive audience-review threshold, a bonus for each work that meets a positive peer-review threshold, and jackpot awards for works deemed particularly notable by peers and patrons.

The cartel spends heavily on advertising and promotion, to make new art be perceived as worth the cost of patronage, and portray patronage to the cartel as cool and fashionable. Paying patrons would get first shot at premium sales, such as concert tickets in favorable locations, or the opportunity to buy the original artwork or significant artifacts of the creation process.

So you might, through your account with the arts cartel, find a new band whose sound you like, add them to your personal favorites library, be notified that they are playing live near you in October, get pre-sale tickets for the front rows of seats, and order a patron-exclusive band t-shirt to wear when you go. Then you download their newest tracks, and maybe decide they're worth $X to you, so you hit the "tip" button on your app and pay the cartel $Y so that they pay Z% of that directly to the artists. Later, you might get the opportunity to buy the actual hair net that Leadvocal Rockstar wore at the concert in a patron-exclusive auction.

Meanwhile, your uncool non-patron friends are stuck listening to Top-40 format radio stations, because it's the most reliable curated content outside the arts cartel and the soulless corporate culture-for-consumption factories.

Disney has proven that a giant aggregation of art-producers can sustain itself on almost pure self-promotion. Disney is a humongous self-reinforcing advertisement for itself, carrying multiple viable brands, each targeting different audience demographics. Disney could certainly survive loss of copyright protection, but they would definitely make less money without it, and may have trouble adapting to the new cash flows due to sheer hugeness.

So should software developers do “live shows” of their coding or depend on the kindness of others?

As far as how well advertising works for content, aren’t we seeing enough issues with that now between ad ridden sites and pay to win games?

Interesting stance. Do you act in a manner consistent with this stance? (i.e. are all your works CC-Zero or equivalent?)

Tell that to all sorts of companies who make billions of dollars off IP

Remember that IP isn't just music and movies and digital data that you as random Joe or Jane Consumer want.

It includes trade secrets, design patents, etc.

You probably don't give a damn about the IP of a tissue mill that includes production data and information about how they run their machines to get a perfect roll of toilet paper every time, but the companies I work with give a lot of a damn about that and have no desire to share that information with anyone ever and hold onto that IP like their life depends on it (because it very well might)

You have to remember that "IP" isn't just stuff that you might want. You have to look past your own nose a little.

Forms of “ownership” are human created incentives towards particular behaviors. Land ownership incentivizes investment and reduces territorial violence. Child custody is a form of ownership that promotes family stability. The purpose of intellectual ownership in the US is explicitly to “promote the Useful Arts.” There is not supposed to be any theoretical justification for it, only empirical.

Yeah right, just hand me over all your lucrative concepts and work, right ?

All of my public work is open source under the MIT license.

Just because you aren't protected by the government, doesn't mean you can't protect your inventions through secrecy.

Secrecy only works for some types of work.

This is one of the points I'm more pragmatic about. Secrecy breeds loss. The products of human creative toil should be kept and enjoyed by all, versus being locked-up being veils of secrecy that inevitably lead to their loss. The only way to preserve ideas is for them to proliferate.

> The products of human creative toil should be kept and enjoyed by all, versus being locked-up being veils of secrecy that inevitably lead to their loss.

Tell that to Disney:

> https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Disney_Vault&oldi...

UPDATE: Another example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20810558

You can pirate all my books, and the top-selling ones are easiest to find. I have a notification set when Google finds new pirate sources, and those notifications roughly track the sales of the books.

The download sites are all in developing countries where the books are not available except by import that would cost 10X or more US buying power relative to price.

In other words, I lost very little income to piracy despite publishers no longer bothering to try to take down piracy sites. In fact it's an open question if piracy helped sell more books because of engagement from readers in developing countries I would not have reached but for piracy.

The explicitly stated purpose of the copyright clause is not to protect "your lucrative concepts." It is “To promote the progress of science and useful arts," a collective benefit. So if optimal promotion of "science and the useful arts," not commerce, notably, means setting the terms to short, very short, or zero, that's perfectly legal.

> There are many many ways to monetize creation including but not limited to subscription, donation, live shows, advertisement, and commission.

Aka, "there are many ways I can personally avoid for paying for the efforts of others".

I've never seen an argument for piracy that has not descended into "I'm not paying".

Everyone seems perfectly ok with someone else paying the cost of creation. And no shit.

Who is paying for all this creation that you enjoy?

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