Hacker News Reader

Comment by logicchains | Hacker News Reader

Taking IP is not a "wealth transfer"; it's wealth copying. The productive capacity of the original holder of the IP/technology is not decreased by someone else also having it, although their revenue might be. This is different from if I go and steal your factory, which prevents you from producing whatever you were using the factory to produce. Intellectual property and property are qualitatively different, and many people argue that society would be better off without the former (see for instance the massive support for SciHub and movie piracy on HN).

View on HN

If someone takes unpublished work for a paper, then uses all that unpublished as of yet work and publishes it, how is that "wealth copying". Its plagiarism as well as unethical, and it is indeed taking away the productive capacity of the person doing the original work.

Support for SciHub is orthogonal to this, these academic papers don't exist yet. So not even the Arxiv would make sense, its not even a preprint, its work in progress thats being co-opted and used for gain within China.

If you could explain how this state of affairs, aka upending the academic publishing model entirely by undermining the entire idea and using unpublished research for your own gain in another country, that would be a constructive way of addressing the issue at hand. As the issue at hand isn't directly economic, but it will affect economics at some point as money is involved.

"Taking IP is not a "wealth transfer"" But it is, because you didn't need to invest the capital to gain the IP. You just stole it. It's rather easy to make a much cheaper product if you didn't have any R&D expenses.

>The productive capacity of the original holder of the IP/technology is not decreased by someone else also having it, although their revenue might be.

This is the contradiction. A reduction in revenue directly translates to a reduction in productive capacity.

Which makes us go down the slippery slope of "if I'm going to the toilet on my employer's time it means I'm reducing its revenues". Which in turn brings us to the employees of the most wealthy men on this planet having to literally piss themselves on the job.

It doesn't make us go down that slippery slope. Those who slide down it are deliberately choosing to do so.

So it's ok to go on the slippery slope of seeing IP infringement as theft (at least I regard that as a slippery slope, and I'm not the only one), but going further down the slippery slope thingie is not ok. So the question becomes: who decides where we should stop the slipper slope-ness?

Society, collectively.

I don't want to make it sound like I'm saying "why, this is simple, obvious to even the most casual of observers" -- what I'm saying is more that this is in line with the kind of decisions societies and individuals have to make all the time about what is and isn't acceptable.

I'm a fiction author myself, and I'm not against giving my work away for free! But I don't think it's unreasonable for me to think I should be the one to make the decision whether or not to do so -- and that means that, at some level, I need control over the "intellectual property" of my fiction. I don't think that having my work digitally available means I somehow automatically forfeit the right to that control that I would have had thirty years ago when you pretty much would have had to buy a physical copy on paper. What readers are ostensibly paying for, after all -- or what I'm giving away, if I choose -- isn't the medium, it's the work expressed in that medium.

And, you know, there are nuances and arguments to be made around that. There's a lot of things about IP law as it exists now I disagree with. But seriously making the argument that we can't let a book publisher enforce their copyright against a pirate ebook site because to do so will inexorably lead us to the Triangle Shirt Fire -- I'm just saying, I think that's a pretty damn hard case to make.

>Taking IP is not a "wealth transfer"; it's wealth copying.

Try "wealth division", by the very act of more people having access to the rights the earnings from its exploitation are distributed.

If I own the patent to the screw, I make all the money from its sale and use. There isn't more money created if you steal it and sell the plans to a hundred thousand fabricators who compete for the same and further markets.

That's not true in the case of creating new markets either geographically or catering to clients who would not be in the market otherwise. If you as the rights holder don't, won't, or refuse to capitalize on those opportunities otherwise, it makes no difference to your bottom line - or might even increase it due to additional advertising by third parties/network effects. In that case (which exists to some extent or another in many common scenarios), it is wealth multiplication.

>That's not true in the case of creating new markets either geographically or catering to clients who would not be in the market otherwise.

This is such a thieve's attitude, "what good is money sitting in this rich man's house unused, when I can create opportunities for all who I would spend it on?"

No it's not, I am just talking about a reality without judging it. Regardless, this is not money but copying of information, with some similarities and some differences which we would all do well to recognize.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com