Hacker News Reader

Comment by shadowgovt | Hacker News Reader

It's not like this absurdity was unknown to the framers of copyright. Thomas Jefferson, writing regarding patents, wrote "other nations have thought that these monopolies produce more embarrassment than advantage to society..." And yet, they persist (and in the modern era, proliferate) because it's generally agreed society derives benefit from paying people for their purely-idea creative work.

... but that doesn't mean copyright and patent aren't a perpetual battle against the "natural" arrangement of idea, and absurdities are extremely possible when the law is misinterpreted or mis-structured.

View on HN

It's weird -- legal arguments aren't protected under any sort of intellectual property regime. In fact in common law jurisdictions, it's encouraged for you base your work off that of previous practitioners. I always wonder how different our intellectual property regime would be if lawyers demanded to be paid royalties for others citing cases which they had won.

Copyright as an institution is grounded on arguments of net societal benefit, and it doesn't take much argument to demonstrate that there is net societal harm to intentionally diminishing people's ability to comply with the law.

Sadly the Norwegian courts do not seem to agree. See this series of blog posts by the creator of CSS. https://www.wiumlie.no/2018/rettspraksis/06-11-blog

Somewhat tangentially, in some fields and jurisdictions, the legal code which is enforced is copyrighted and paywalled by third parties or the Gov. itself.

https://www.aclu.org/blog/free-speech/court-tells-georgia-it...

> And yet, they persist (and in the modern era, proliferate) because it's generally agreed society derives benefit from paying people for their purely-idea creative work.

Who "generally agree"s on this? The existence of laws doesn't indicate the mood of society.

> The existence of laws doesn't indicate the mood of society.

But if laws are proliferating and regularizing instead of standing still or being abolished, and one assumes that elected representatives are acting on the will of the people, it probably does.

There's lots of controversy over how to improve copyright / patent law, but not very many people in governments in the EU, US, China, Japan, Australia, &c are talking seriously about just burning the whole copyright / patent system to the ground. At least a subset of the countries in the groups listed are generally understood to have representative governments.

> one assumes that elected representatives are acting on the will of the people

Yeah, that's the assumption I take issue with.

Representative governments are well known for supporting powerful groups over the collective benefit of society. Just look at any of those countries tax codes and you will find a multitude of special exceptions.

Patents are of limited duration because the tradeoffs of unlimited patents are so horrific. If we accept a billion dollar drug must enter the public domain, clearly copyright should also be limited just as it was proposed in the US constitution. However, because a tiny minority has a huge benefit and society does not really notice the difference you get the modern mess of unending copyright.

"A tiny minority has a huge benefit and society does not really notice the difference" seems like a utilitarian argument that the system is working as intended; there is net positive benefit.

> "A tiny minority has a huge benefit and society does not really notice the difference" seems like a utilitarian argument that the system is working as intended; there is net positive benefit.

If tiny minority + 'society' is the entirety of the system, then that's true, but there are also plenty of players who lose out due to restrictive IP regimes—and it's hard to quantify the extent of those losses. (Whether or not the benefits they would reap from looser IP are appropriate or fair is beside the question for utilitarian computations.)

If it costs 350 million people 1 cent to hand me 1 million dollars they don’t notice, yet that’s a net loss. Critically, even when you include those who benefit it’s still a loss.

Only if you consider money completely fungible and use money as your utility function for determining loss here.

You haven't diminished the ability for 350 million people to do things, practically, by shaving 1 cent off of them. But adding the ability a million dollars provides one individual to do something cool with 1 million they couldn't do before has increased the overall capabilities of everyone.

In essence, you've just described Kickstarter's business model.

You’re forgetting just how many organizations all do this, it’s adding up to a significant chunk of global GDP. It’s got real long term consequences.

Basically, even if individual bacteria are unnoticed enough of them can kill you.

> Patents are of limited duration because the tradeoffs of unlimited patents are so horrific.

What would be the point of a patent system with unlimited duration? If we wanted that, we could just have companies not reveal their inventions in the first place

I generally agree that society benefits from IP.

I think IP is required to monitize valuable ideaS, and monitzation leads to social availability.

On the personal level, I would not like it if publishers could freely print the works of new authors, or engineering solutions I spend years on could be copy and pasted.

Some people prefer Creative Commons, and they are free to publish their work that way. Others need or want financial compensation.

> I generally agree that society benefits from IP.

I certainly didn't mean to say that no-one agrees with it, but your personal agreement doesn't evince the general agreement that shadowgovt (an interesting username, in this context …) suggested. To be fair, neither does my skepticism provide any evidence against it.

I think we can align on the lack of evidence presented. There is also the question on what agreed to means in this sense.

In terms of public opinion, it would be interesting to know what studies have been done. I imagine if you would get broad support for an author copyrighting a book, and less on patenting a pre-existing genetic sequence.

As another unsubstantiated claim, I think if you sat down with the general public and the criteria for patents, they would mostly agree.

The challenge has to do with implementing them and the legal process around them.

If a crappy patent is issued to large corporation, it is incredibly expensive to challenge them.

Jefferson's rich friends.

They persist because they allow some people to create extreme monetization strategies, which feeds into lobbying congress for further expansion of copyright.

That doesn't explain why copyright regimes similar to the US persist in countries around the world, or why countries are finding their way to treaties that standardize international copyright enforcement that look more like the US regime than other country's regimes.

The US has a lot of clout in the world and exports its laws and culture abroad pretty heavily. Countries that have tried to outlaw Coke or Cigarettes are usually sued into the ground by large US corporations and, when that fails, the US has used sanctions to back up the accessibility of US products.

Basically, America's crazy overreach forces our laws onto other nations - this is actually one thing that really frustrates me about corporate tax loopholes, that overreach could be trivially used to force better international standards for corporate VAT taxes there just isn't the political will (due to lobbying) to get it done.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com