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> At no point do you "own" the idea, because as soon as you release it into the world, it is already in the minds of many, some of which may be able to put it to better use than you, or to improve it faster than you.

When it comes to patents, even if you don't share the idea, others will come up with it independently. And the patent system is perfectly fine if you patent something then sit on the idea for 20 years and never allow it or any derived products be made or used.

> And the patent system is perfectly fine if you patent something then sit on the idea for 20 years and never allow it or any derived products be made or used.

This should be banned either way by mandatory licensing requirements under FRAND terms as part of the patent grant, especially if the holder does not actively use the patent.

Too much progress in society/technology is blocked because companies are sitting on patents and not licensing them.

Also true, and another reason why the patent system is broken.

All reasonable points. But except in an ideal world, I don't see how people who shape and enforce the laws are incentivized to realize them. That intellectual property is "out of control" is perhaps but part of a bigger picture that the government is dysfunctional and out-of-control.

You can talk about how things should be until the cows come home, but at the end of the day, the big question is how do you realize your ideas in the world.

This.

The patent system has long been touted to help the little man, but today it's used by people who have legal fee money to bully everyone else. But why or how would this change given the political structure in the states or anywhere for that matter.

This is a byproduct of centralizing vertical power which is the very nature of most modern governments and their respective cultures. A distributed horizontally cut set of powers would be better and I think with the states, states rights argument support this.

Without the right to exclusively profit from the final product, are pharmaceutical companies gonna invest all the resources and engage in all the bureaucracy-navigation it takes to develop a new drug?

> Without the right to exclusively profit from the final product, are pharmaceutical companies gonna invest all the resources and engage in all the bureaucracy-navigation it takes to develop a new drug?

Per recent congressional testimony, virtually all drugs are developed with NIH (federal) funding. So the first order of business in fixing this problem is dispelling the notion that there is such a thing as a "market" for pharmaceuticals. There is not. Government money is present quite literally from the very first step.

Coincidentally, dispelling false notions of the existence of "free markets" is the first step to solving a lot of other economic problems as well.

https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2019/02/01/re...

Virtually all drugs come out of an NIH-funded lab, but so do a huge number of other drugs and therapies that don't work. The vast majority of things that come out of research labs have no hope at making it past a phase 1 trial.

The drug companies do a lot of R&D to validate the ideas of drug discovery teams and to test for side effects. They spend incredible amounts of money on this, much more than the labs that initially proposed the drug.

But that work isn’t only magically able to be done by corporations. If pharmaceutical corps like Gilead and others didn’t rake in billions per year and were taxed properly (i.e. no more rentier incomes), that same work could be done in the open by NIH and others. Why are people so keen on state granted monopolies (patents) when it can be done open source?

> Virtually all drugs come out of an NIH-funded lab, but so do a huge number of other drugs and therapies that don't work. The vast majority of things that come out of research labs have no hope at making it past a phase 1 trial.

None of this has anything to do with the fact that the government is footing this bill.

> The drug companies do a lot of R&D to validate the ideas of drug discovery teams and to test for side effects. They spend incredible amounts of money on this, much more than the labs that initially proposed the drug.

Yeah, they do a lot of that... with taxpayer money.

The government and taxpayer foot a very small portion of the bill, and do so willingly with no strings attached.

How exclusive? For all time?

For the foreseeable tenure of the current board of executives.

This is already how copyright works, so I am not sure what you are proposing. A reduction of time? How much?

No, copyright restricts copying and derivative works without royalties. As I said in my comment, I propose the restriction only be on profiting from work, and for a much shorter period of time than currently (70 years for creative works? Absurd. 10 years is far more appropriate).

I would actually go even further and say that the only restriction we should eventually need is crediting the original author. Potential individual profit (as in economic profit) makes sense in the current world where the distribution of resources is terrible and you want to be able to capitalize on your ideas. But ideally, if that's not an issue in the future, all you could reasonably want is "acknowledgement for your contributions". Even there the line is hard to draw, but I find myself more and more aligned with this perspective lately. Might still be too egocentric, though, and maybe not even "acknowledgement" is necessary. Maybe if acknowledgement was culturally more widespread even a law like this wouldn't make sense to me.

That is a vacuous statement.

Yes, profit is only a problem if money is a problem. But given money is still used by society (and will be used for decades), it is pretty obvious you cannot remove profit.

Do it, and only rich people will be able to create. No Harry Potter for us.

Well, I feel your reply is somewhat uncharitable.

I mean, I said "ideally", and I didn't talk about money disappearing, only about, as you expressed, "money [not] being a problem". Which you might still consider naive, fair enough, but that's another story. And honestly, even if in practice it makes no immediate difference, telling apart the "moral" issues and the practical ones is relevant for analysis and defining the direction we want to move towards.

Limiting it to "profiting" opens up a giant load of issues. Is an artist not profiting from their art, do they not pay the rent with it, increase their reputation? Isn't a scientist profiting from their research, as results will also benefit their reputation and get them the next grant or tenure position / promotion?

If you're limiting it to "immediate profit", I guess Amazon could've used anything and everything because they never made a profit until 2001.

I very much agree regarding the years, though. And it's not even 70 years, it's 70 years after the creator's death.

That wouldn't work.

Free copies, even if you restrict profiting on the copies, implies the value effectively goes to zero. Most things can be digitally copied for free (art, books, software...). It is already a problem even with the restrictions.

Derivative works without royalties implies you would get countless copy-pasted works with the minimum amount of changes done to claim they are derivative. It already happens nowadays with things that try to claim they are not derivative works but completely new things when it is clear they are not.

Both these things are already super expensive to keep track and defend for small companies. If anything, what should be done is make them cheaper.

The 70 years is the only thing I agree. 10 is quite short. 20 would be fair and way better than the 70.

I'm sure many people are going to disagree with this, but authors should only receive income if people think their work is valuable enough to be rewarded for it. There will always be selfish people that would rather just download a copy rather than support an author. But I don't think simply writing a book entitles you to income. It was your choice to write it, nobody paid you to (if they did, then you are already paid for the work). If you choose to write a book, and nobody wants to pay you for it, then how good actually is it?

I have perhaps a different view of the arts to some people. I see them as good, noble pursuits in and of themselves. They should be done for their own sake. Art and literature was in my opinion, at its highest point, when the motivation for profit was secondary to the motivation for expression and exploration. As such, I see no reason for we as a society to restrict what people can and can't do with the stories, artistic works, and cultural works of our society. They best serve the interests of a society when they are free to spread, free to be shared, and free to be adapted.

I don't believe in artificial scarcity. If the only way for me to get access to a book is to pay a publisher for it, then it's worth has been artificially increased. I value the experience of going to the theatre, so I will still buy a ticket even if I can pirate the film a couple months later. I value seeing a musical artist perform live, so I will pay for a concert even if I can download their album for free. I value possessing hard copies of good works, so I will pay for them to support the author even if I can download the PDF for free. This is how you separate the truly valued works, from the works that have been artificially given a monetary value for the sake of profit raising.

And I hate to say it, but our social media frenzied society has inflated everybody's self worth. Just because you can publish an ebook in 3 clicks, doesn't mean it is good literature, and doesn't mean it is worth paying for. Copyright law which makes bad literature valuable is a bad law. Good literature will always be good, regardless of any laws that exist to protect it from distribution.

I know a lot of folks who don't love that they have to choose between charging for their work and starving. You seem to suggest that the first of those options should be foreclosed and replaced with "beg for patronage".

Which is pretty cool, because all else equal, that forces people to keep creating, lest they lose for lack of output whatever patronage they've managed to obtain.

Like, it's fine to say ars gratia artis, but you need to come up with a way for that actually to happen. What you've described here is much more ars gratia affluentium. What ends up getting made is, and is only, what people want to pay for, which at best is no improvement over the status quo, and probably isn't even as good as that.

I fail to see how copyright law as it exists now, removes the need to "beg for patronage". If anything, being able to freely access an authors work may generate more interest for lesser known authors.

I think, as with many industries, there is an unfair wealth divide amongst creative professionals. I don't think JK Rowling is such a better writer than most other writers alive today, that she deserves to have made billions of dollars for her work. The only reason she has made that much is because of copyright law. If anything, copyright law increases the divide between the lucky authors, and the much more talented but much more unlucky ones.

I tend to think the eight-movie deal had something to do with the money. Would it have failed to happen without copyright law? Your analysis should account for that, and it doesn't.

It also doesn't account for how, when there's no option to do anything but give it away, the people who succeed aren't those doing the best work, but those doing the best marketing. What's to stop them from simply finding good work by "talented but unlucky" people, representing it as their own, and getting rich on the back of it?

> But I don't think simply writing a book entitles you to income.

Writing a copyrighted book today does not entitle you to income either.

Do you really think artists make money just because they publish something?

> I see them as good, noble pursuits in and of themselves. They should be done for their own sake.

Agreed, but unless you are rich or someone supports you, that simply does not work.

I suggest you take a look at universal income instead. One of its advantages is that people could work on non-profitable endeavors if they are fine with a very basic life.

That, or wait until Star Trek becomes a reality :-)

> I value seeing a musical artist perform live, so I will pay for a concert even if I can download their album for free.

How do you do that for books and software which do not have any equivalent to a concert or performance?

> This is how you separate the truly valued works, from the works that have been artificially given a monetary value for the sake of profit raising.

Giving a concert does not mean your work is valuable. Neither publishing it digitally. And neither guarantee any audience whatsoever, much less profit...

> Just because you can publish an ebook in 3 clicks, doesn't mean it is good literature, and doesn't mean it is worth paying for.

This seems to follow from the "copyright entitles you to income", but since that isn't true, this does not follow either.

Someone publishing a bad ebook (actually, not even a bad one, average ones and even many good ones too) is not going to get any sales. Ask any aspiring average author or artist. They will have countless stories of how their endeavors have not paid any bills yet.

> Ask any aspiring average author or artist. They will have countless stories of how their endeavors have not paid any bills yet.

How doesn't this support my argument of reforming copyright laws? If even the (imo flawed) intent of copyright laws isn't doing what it's supposed to do (an economic incentive for creation of work) then what is the harm in reform?

You're right that holding copyright doesn't magically generate sales. People have to value the work in the first place. But I don't see how copyright laws as they exist now, make the work any more valuable.

When I talk about value, I am not talking about something in a supply-demand sense. I am talking about a work being genuinely quality so that it earns some kind of reward for its merit.

For example, I don't see buying a book the same as buying a ticket for entry. I see it as supporting an author. Let me use an example:

I might buy a ticket to a museum, not knowing what artwork is inside. It could all be atrocious, or maybe just not to my taste. Regardless, it could be work I would never buy. Now, the sale of the ticket as been a "fee to see". I made no choice over whether I wanted to support the artists. I believe that copyright laws as they exist now, place books in a kind of imaginary museum. An author isn't deserving of income simply because they produced something. Nobody asked them to. If they were paid by a publisher to, then great. If not, then what makes them entitled to income? The mere act of putting pen to paper? Anybody can do that. If I want to support them I will do so based on merit. And I can only assess merit of I can read what they have written.

> How doesn't this support my argument of reforming copyright laws? If even the (imo flawed) intent of copyright laws isn't doing what it's supposed to do (an economic incentive for creation of work) then what is the harm in reform?

It doesn't because your suggested reform would only make it (even) worse...

It'd imply only rich people could be full-time artists/authors. That is how it used to be centuries ago, by the way.

> The 70 years is the only thing I agree. 10 is quite short. 20 would be fair and way better than the 70.

Why is 10 years too short? Why is 20 better? What kind of profit does a huge book publishing company or a software corporation still need to extract after first 10 years of earning the revenue that needs to be protected?

Remember, most of profits from copyright don't go to starving artists, but to huge media and software conglomerates which then use this money to pay lawyers and lobby for more copyright extensions.

Love the idea of intellectual leases. I now regard renewable leases as a cure-all for most of society's ills.

That said...

The point of intellectual property is to improve society, not enrich the owner of the IP.

Note that I said "owner", not inventor or creator, who typically get screwed.

Yeah great but when you put JK and HP stories as an example you trow out the window all those people whose works take decades to get popular. There is a lot more authors who struggle whole their life's. You should not change law based on exceptions.

Making the distinction between a derivative work that makes money vs one that doesn't could be helpful in this case.

Why grant any exclusive rights to creator ? Why not let people remix freely and give back a standardized 20% to original creators ?

Harry Potter would not have been written and published, and made into a global phenom without IP laws in the ballpark as they stand.

There is zero chance the Potter films would have been made were the Studios not able to protect their distribution.

There are other parties in the system, the content creators, who are pretty strongly affected by these rules - it's an equilibrium, you can get the same kind of output when you change the to empower one side.

> Harry Potter would not have been written

That's not clear at all. Many people create things for vanity purposes. And some people just like telling stories.

> and published

Printers published books with abandon before there was copyright. In fact, the motivation for copyright laws was to put a stop to that.

Yeah, the argument that creative works wouldn't have been created without current IP laws is rubbish. Almost the entirely of the Western literature cannon was written before our current IP laws. Even in Dicken's time, he was able to profit without obscene copyright laws, because back then publishers would simply purchase the manuscript from him (which would be his income) and then they would print and sell them.

I find the notion that the number of times your book is read should be proportional to the income you make from it, to be entirely antithetical to the point of creativity and art. Doesn't matter whether your book is read by 1 person or by 1 million. You still put in the same amount of work. And, presumably, the higher quality the work, the more will read it. But not always. That's life. If a publisher thinks they can sell me or if you're an already famous and established author, publishers will buy your manuscripts for higher prices. If a publisher wants to enter into a royalties agreement then that is their own affair. We as a society should not be encouraging such arrangements - which is exactly what our copyright laws are designed to do.

That brings up the possibility of ad-supported writing - like we see with free TV, most of the internet, etc.

Heck, I've often paid writers to write stuff for my business that I then give away for free.

"Yeah, the argument that creative works wouldn't have been created without current IP laws is rubbish. "

I didn't say that 'no works would have been created' - I said Harry Potter would not have - and certainly not the films.

I am not denying that some content will be created - but the anti IP people are sadly denying the very stark reality that most of it would not.

Harry Potter is definitely an example of a work that would not have been created, given the authors personal history during writing her works.

The sheer arrogance of those dismissing but the humane aspect of content creators not being able to make a living from the works, combined with the ignorance of the material reality of what this would mean for content creation and massive industries is missing from the argument.

"I find the notion that the number of times your book is read should be proportional to the income you make from it, to be entirely antithetical to the point of creativity and art."

Spoken by someone who has never actually created such work I can assume?

Have you ever actually made any 'art' or tried to do this full time?

Because your treatise speaks entirely and fully from the perspective of the consumer, who naturally, doesn't want to pay anything.

"I want everything for free because that's the way I feel about art" is not an argument.

I can comment and have opinions on the artistic and creative pursuits without actively pursuing all of them.

You cannot prove that HP would not have been written if profit protections didn't exist, unless you ask JK "if copyright didn't exist, would you still have written HP?".

My argument is that creative works will still be created because they always have been, and because people have created them before our laws existed.

You also assume that for-profit creators stopping their work is a bad thing. I am happy for people to be earning a living doing what they do. But I think the way we go about providing them with it is wrong.

The material reality is that artists were only successful if they were actually good. That shouldn't stop people from doing them - like I said elsewhere, I think artistic pursuits are good in themselves aside from profit.

But walk into any bookstore, go to the fiction section, and gaze on all the mediocre literature you can buy. I don't say that arrogantly. I couldn't write much of it. I am not putting myself above those authors. I am simply saying that the works themselves are mediocre, they won't be studied or remembered. They are simply entertainment. And I am happy for it to exist. But I can guarentee you that many of those authors were writing purely in the hopes that they'd "make it big". That maybe, just maybe, a movie company would see their book, and want to buy multi-million dollar film rights.

This, to me, is a perverse incentive for writing. And so I have no problem if less of it is published with the changing of laws.

Not everybody needs to go to university. Not everybody is a skilled enough actor to make it on Broadway. Not everybody is the next Michaelangelo. Pretending that the arts is a level playing field in terms of ability is a waste of time.

Talent is always rewarded eventually. The best artists don't need to say how good they are. The best authors don't need to say how good they are. In almost every case of copyright litigation, I saw mediocre creators quibbling over small profits that are "rightfully theirs". Just stop. Save your breath, and find a day job. Keep writing for the love it. Start a journal when you go home. Try and sell some of your work to a small publishing house for a small fee. And then be chuffed if enough people like it enough to copy it.

I just want to add to that under the current system very few artists are able to make a living off of it. Consider all the scripts that never get made into movies, the mountains of not-bestseller books, the musicians that have other jobs to pay the bills.

I know several people who wrote highly regarded technical books. Not one of them makes enough off of books to be a living. What the books do do for them is make their reputation and careers.

The artists that do make a living are doing artwork for web pages, advertising, packaging, etc.

"That's not clear at all."

It's clear in the case of Harry Potter and even more clear in the case of the films.

Remember that artists are still able to give away their works for free even today.

How many of them do it?

How many filmmakers make films to just give away?

How many actors work for free?

IP always needs be re-worked and there are a lot failings, but most of the anti-IP arguments fail to consider the reality of the other side of the equilibrium.

> It's clear in the case of Harry Potter

How do you know that?

> and even more clear in the case of the films.

How many movies are published straight to youtube? How about all the TV shows that were ad-supported?

> How many of them do it?

See youtube.