"New ideas come mostly from recombining old ideas."
Does this suggest that new ideas would become easier to find over time because there are more combinations of old ideas?
Does this suggest that new ideas would become easier to find over time because there are more combinations of old ideas?
The idea that invention is a isolated creative force that pops up without dependency on anything else has always been a myth without foundation.
But its increasingly questionable to me. Open source software has shown the great wealth of innovation that occurs when we collaborate instead of hiding our work.
I think we could (probably) sharply increase the rate of innovation if we let go of intellectual property restrictions. I really want economists and other thinkers to take seriously this notion that intellectual property restrictions are deeply harmful to society and study it in detail. Unfortunately entrenched interests benefit from the status quo (naturally) and I feel they would be in opposition here. But we can still work to open source our output. It’s harder when open source competes with closed source, but if we can learn how to use open source to our advantage we might be able to win.
In any case I think it is desperately important that we take seriously the idea that IP laws might be doing more harm than good. Most people I speak to take it as a given that we need them, and I think we’re shooting ourselves in the foot.
As long as we're looking at deeply held assumptions, it's probably also a good idea to figure out what the ideal pace of innovation is. None is certainly bad, but too fast also causes problems for people: technological products are expensive and will be shorter-lived as innovation speeds up. At some point, the cost to society of all that churn probably balances against the benefits.
That being said, do you have a concrete licensing model in mind?
I think any licease that takes 50% of revenue would be fair to both parties with a minimum for the small user.
This is an extraordinary claim that demands actual evidence. Eliminating IP costs might make things cheaper, but physical goods (like food) will still need material, energy, and labor inputs to produce for the forseeable future. How do you plan to bring these costs down to “near zero”?
If you want economists to study this, you’ll need to convince them it’s plausible. That requires at least some back-of-the-envelope reasoning from data that already exists, even if it’s not a perfect example of the policies you’re advocating. There are records from times & places where IP law was either nonexistent or unenforced; what do they say about your theories? If you expect things to be different this time, what leads you to think that (with specifics)?
First of all I will point out that if one individual creates something useful and then a major service provider picks it up, this can mean very good things for society. If the service is good, hopefully AWS can provide it to many customers and help many people gain access to the utility this creative person has helped realize. There are situations where the big company disturbs the project so much it fails, but I assume you’re actually asking what happens when someone else profits off of your work.
Well in the theoretical I am also imagining that all parties share. This would mean that even if AWS takes on the code and sells cloud services with it, they would only be competing against other cloud providers who could provide an identical service. That is to say there is no one way source code exchange, it should be mutual. In this case, I would argue society only stands to gain from AWS entering the fray. It is a pure positive and not a dilemma directly.
Then there is the question of the individual. This one individual worked hard on something for five years and then a big company swooped in and took the profit they could have made. But if it is open source in my theoretical then anyone could have swooped in at any time, and the creator should have known that was a possibility. They never should have sunk more effort in to the project than they were comfortable with knowing an alternative provider could have taken over the market. That creative person should instead have joined groups of other engineers working on projects that people need. Perhaps they contribute to a project that eventually gets taken up by AWS, but it would not damage their livelihood as they would just shift focus to another.
We play by the rules we’re given. In a society where everyone shares, creative projects do not strictly belong to one individual. We would not make choices that exposed us to risks we did not in some way accept.
Some would say that without this person being willing to sink five years in to something for their own profit, they would never be creative and this would be a loss for society. But I don’t believe that. I’m two and a half years in to a project that I’ve licensed CC0 & BSD. Anyone could swoop in at any time and bring it to production, potentially earning great profit. And I would find it a great honor if someone did that. So you see, the creative drive exists outside of the need for profit.
As far as how people survive - there is a great deal of work that cannot be digitally duplicated. You can pirate a musicians albums but you can’t pirate a live show. In a world where there was no IP restrictions and we all shared, people would find income doing novel work, instead of duplicating something someone had already done. One good hack to this is to automatically provide for everyone. Universal basic services. Then there’s no starving artists.
Sidebar: IP laws are not strictly necessary to enforce this. You are not decent to your neighbor because the law requires it. If society values open source and collaboration and boycotts those who would use IP law selfishly, we can accomplish this all with no change in laws. Some kind of union system can help enforce these boycotts and formalize their terms. Though some laws do need to change to reduce the benefits of playing selfishly.
Linux -> clone of UNIX, on desktop sometimes macOS
Git -> clone of BitKeeper
Android -> developed in a proprietary way with minimal community, heavily iOS inspired
GIMP -> clone of Photoshop
OpenOffice -> clone of MS Office
qemu -> clone of VMWare
etc.
It makes sense. Open source projects exist to 'scratch an itch' and are rarely optimised to maximise the size of the userbase. There's little incentive for open source developers to innovate: more users can be as much of a downside as an upside. Mostly it just equals more support headaches. Proprietary products are all about getting lots more users, so there's an incentive to try new things.