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Comment by breck | Hacker News Reader

Ah yes, bravo EFF, you've won another battle barely keeping us at the status quo.

When are you going to stop playing whack-a-mole trying to defend against every assault on internet freedoms and go on the offensive and try to win the game for the good guys?

We now have the ability to give the poorest child on earth access to the same information as the richest, and yet we allow industry to shackle us instead.

It's time to demand intellectual freedom. #AbolishCopyright. #AbolishPatents. #AbolishImaginaryPropertyLaws

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You are probably getting downvoted because this is the best we have right now. We would all love to stop playing whack-a-mole, but for that we need more resources for groups like EFF, not disregard them for what they actually accomplish. If you know any ways or groups more successful in achieving the goals of intellectual freedom, a lot of us are very interested.

You're upset that the EFF isn't able to work miracles?

Abolishing intellectual property (which, frankly, sounds like a terrible idea) would be a global effort requiring the invalidation of treaties and battling a nearly infinite war chest because the wealthiest companies in the world rely on it.

"Abolishing intellectual property"

The other part is that nobody but a small group of fringe people want that, and the populist appeal of 'free movies' would wane pretty quickly as movies and entertainment literally stopped being made.

Among myriad other products and services.

> Intellectual Property

We've come to call ideas and iterative mutations of such thoughtstuff "property" as if thoughts can be owned.

What we call "intellectual property" is more accurately (at least in my current strong conclusion) called monopoly rights. Monopoly rights over the application and commercial profit of such thoughtstuff as a conscious trade-off/government subsidy to provide economic incentive for innovation outside of whatever would exist naturally.

Property rights over scarce resources are a fundamental tenant of a liberal society.

Intellectual property is a government subsidy.

Right, and despite all the fury and word salad, it still exists and will continue to do so.

...until it doesn't. Preserving IP takes a lot of effort from a lot of highly-paid people. Currently, most of those are compensated by the public, but that won't always be the case.

If the EFF has to play whack-a-mole it's because there is no one single problem or threat vector to internet freedoms. Going on the offensive would require just as much whack-a-mole, fighting battles on many fronts, because there is no single issue they could fight for & win that would resolve the entire picture.

And in the case of the .ORG issue, what would going on the offensive even have looked like? How would the EFF have fought off an attempt by a private equity firm to obtain & abuse stewardship over the TLD?

> there is no one single problem or threat vector to internet freedoms

There is one and only one problem: #ImaginaryPropertyLaws.

What do all of the companies and organizations the EFF is constantly battling have in common? They all derive their power from #ImaginaryPropertyLaws and would all be disrupted without them.

How is a domain imaginary property? Only one person can use it. Whether you call it property or something else, the end result is the same.

How is internet censorship related to property? No more so than speech out in the real world is related to property rights.

I'm not saying you're even wrong: You've simply made an extremely vague claim without explanation of what you mean or, in response to my comment, what single battle could be fought to resolve the issue. Your comment lacks the necessary criteria to even evaluate it.

> How is a domain imaginary property?

You are right about this one, the ".org" registry is orthogonal to IP laws and in fact, there's nothing wrong with having centralized registries (which trademarks sort of are) as long as anyone can start one, which anyone can here. I would say the only connection to this specific issue is that I believe we've stagnated in protocols the past 30 years since the Web and EFF both came out due to copyright laws. We're stuck in a more centralized place, and less decentralized where we could move to if information could move freely.

Internet censorship is handsdown completely dominated by having copyright laws. If you abolish copyright laws, you'd open the flood gates of peer 2 peer information sharing. those p2p connections would grow very, very strong (what fires together wires together), and it would become near impossible for centralized censorship orgs to work.

Very fair points! Hope that clarifies my stance a bit. People say "the world is not black and white." I say "no, it's black and black^2". Abolishing #ImaginaryProperty in my mind is black^2, the current status quo is far inferior from every angle (except for people whose most important metric is to be in the .1%).

I think I generally disagree, but thanks for a more detailed response, it's an interesting discussion.

I agree with your goals. I absolutely want to both reduce the strength of copyright restrictions and encourage a culture of open access IP (aka open source, FLOSS, etc).

That said, the tone of your comment isn’t generally appreciated on HN. The sarcasm can promote unhealthy discussion, and the use of hashtags is odd since HN doesn’t use hashtags.

I hope you will continue to talk about problems with IP restrictions without resorting to this kind of cynical sarcasm. It’s an important idea and when presented well could help change some minds here.

I honestly wish the EFF was as powerful as you imagine it to be.

Right? Why throw stones at the EFF who are actually doing something in the fight. They don't have the resources to do more than now, and yeah it feels like a losing battle. Don't shit on the people who are with you in that battle though.

We don't need to go to this extreme.

Restore copyrights and patents to 25 years. Place burden of proof on the copyright claimant.

Ah yes, the extreme. Allowing poor kids in inner city schools to share information that rich kids have access to, using property their parent(s) purchased with their own money. How extreme. Pointing out that a new book is literally made entirely of symbols invented thousands of years ago and contributes nothing of value in comparison, how extreme. Saying that we shouldn't prioritize selling bad medicines over good ones, how extreme.

Patents are currently only 20 years.

Yup. These people are probably thinking of copyright, which software fall under. Which current is 95 years from publication or author’s lifespan + 75 years, and should almost certainly be shortened closer to patent length.

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