Hacker News Reader

Comment by cturner | Hacker News Reader

    Here is an absolutely excellent cross section of the
    startup world

It's irrelevant. In an absence of IP, the playing field would be totally different, and hence there would be other strategies and other startups.

That's why I brought up opportunity cost in my parent post.

The playing field would be completely different, but not necessarily inferior.

Both you and the original poster are trying to make a defence of IP based on circular logic that avoids considering opportunity cost. That's invalid.

View on HN

So is your answer, "none of them"?

His answer is:

'If the system changes, then it produces a different set of results'

I could use my godlike powers to create a true democracy, a dictatorship or a theocracy. Different people would raise to the top in each case.

Pointing to the people who have risen to the top for any one of those and saying 'if you changed the system, none of those people would be there' is simply a trivial truism, it is not an argument for not changing the system.

I already understood that he wanted to change the question so that he could answer it more easily. But I asked a pretty specific question, and I'm curious about the answer. There's a lot of companies on this list. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that if most of them didn't rely on IP protections, someone would have called me out on it already.

Conclusion: most YC companies are significantly dependent on IP laws to operate.

You may come to that conclusion if you choose.

Its widely accepted that where an absence of evidence exists, it is logically and scientifically reasonable to come to a conclusion based on an individual's personal bias.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com