There Are No Good Arguments for Intellectual Property (2010) | Hacker News Reader

There Are No Good Arguments for Intellectual Property (2010)

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The argument for patents is simple and clear: the alternative is broader use of trade secrets. In a patent regime, a company can (indeed must) publish their process, in exchange for a temporary monopoly on exploiting it commercially. In return, everyone else can learn it, implement it for research, and improve it, at which point the patent no longer applies.

Copyright was also compelling in the technological milieu in which it was invented. Without it, the profit earned on a piece of writing goes entirely to the publisher, which is exploitative. I'm of the opinion that zero-cost copying has punctured this pretty thoroughly, and that the ludicrous extension of the term of copyright has further undermined the justice of the practice.

If given a choice between the IP laws we have, and no IP laws at all, I'd take the latter. But these arguments for patents and copyright aren't some clever thing I came up with: they're the basic justification for that area of law, and they always have been. The author is simply being disingenuous.

"The argument for patents is simple and clear: the alternative is broader use of trade secrets."

Yet it falls into the neat, plausible and wrong category of ideas. In reality that isn't what happens, and it is based upon the assumption that ideas are unique and only occur once, when we know that ideas are ten a penny, and it is implementations in practice that we are short of - something that is exacerbated when you have to negotiate the patent troll arena.

Trade secrets are not a threat to the advancement of society because they will be rediscovered. Stopping implementations is a threat because that's actually what we want to have cheaper goods and services - which advances society.

The X causes Y arguments behind intellectual property laws are classic truth by repeated assertion.

There's also the issue of tactics being used to extend hold on these concepts indefinitely. Intel and AMD don't have much competition going in their duopoly i believe in part because by the time their patents would run out the processor standards have been extended with new technologies blocking anyone from ever entering that space to compete and help innovate.

Patents cover implementations, not ideas.

You've rightfully pointed out that there used to be good arguments for intellectual property, arguments which definitely used to have merit since they brought our existing legal framework of intellectual property into this world.

The future of intellectual property though, seems quite in doubt. I'll not re-elaborate the points made in the original article, and instead I'll state what I believe the future will actually look like:

The future of getting paid is going to be in "payment for genesis" not "payment for control". This means a return to patronage and a return to paying for things which can only ever be inherently temporary, such as a live performance of music.

In the long-long term, as we're going to see piracy rise once more in the face of ever-fractured streaming services we'll probably see the world of "payment for control" be further and further cannibalized, eventually seeing a greater and greater shift by artists (across most all media) towards funding sources that (right now) look like Patreon and its ilk. We're already seeing these changes, and I think the future will only see these accelerate.

I saw from the pirate party a presentation where copyright came to be as a reaction on the printing press. The catholic church feared to lose control over what information people would receive, and the scribes required protection. The state liked this control too, so a monopoly was added to law.

So there used to be mostly bad reasons for IP. It was always the haves repressing the havenots.

Not the one I read, but another source with a similar story: https://torrentfreak.com/nothing-new-under-the-copyright-ecl...

I broadly agree, but various classes of IP law collide in an ugly way in software:

- the source code can be kept a trade secret and enjoy copyright protection at the same time

- the object code used to be unable to be hidden (+), but it derived copyright from being a derived work (via compilation) of the source

- the technology can be covered by patents. Since the object code is incomprehensible, there is no assurance that competitors will be able to figure out which patents it implements, so they become like legal landmines deterring innovation.

(+) With the advent of microservices, often no more.

> a company can (indeed must) publish their process...everyone else can learn it

I used to find this compelling, then I found out that standard practice is to avoid reading patents, because 1) they're not written to instruct, but drafted to claim broad implications and exclude prior art, and 2) exposure to patented material increases liability if you are found to be infringing.

Are there any examples of any inventor using published patents to learn from, rather than just patent searches to help drafting their own patents?

> improve it, at which point the patent no longer applies.

This is generally wrong - the original patent still applies. You can get a separate patent on your improvements, but until the original patent expires, you can't use the foundational invention without licensing the original patent.

Having participated in the system as an inventor, I can confirm that this is unfortunately quite accurate. The patent lawyer was surprised that we sent a technical expert who actually understood the invention to explain it to them, and seemed to find it a welcome and refreshing change from their usual clients.

I really have read some other patents in the field. It turned out that some US universities like to patent maths before they publish it in papers or at conferences. I learned nothing new that the academic papers didn't already cover. The only result was that, fearful of committing wilful infringement, we avoided using anything resembling that entire area in any software associated with our invention. The lawyer advised me not to do that (read other patents) any more.

> In a patent regime, a company can (indeed must) publish their process

Must they? From what I have heard, a number of technologies have not been patented, simply because the potential liability from keeping it as a trade secret was less than the liability of the process being made public

What the OP said is completely incorrect. No idea or process must be published. You have the right to keep any idea a secret. However to patent the idea you must publish it.

What I said is completely correct, if you read the entire sentence: to obtain an exclusive monopoly, you must patent, which requires publication.

No what you said is completely wrong. Publication is not required for an exclusive monopoly it is only required for a patent.

There are many many monopolies and oligopolies over products that are enforced without patents or use of intellectual property laws.

Oil was an example of a oligopoly enforced by geography. OPEC.

The f35 is a publicly and internationally distributed product for which a monopoly by lockheed is obtained by unparalleled and uncopyable technical aptitude crystallized into the product itself. This as well as astronomically high costs, and trade secrets help make sure very few entities can copy the product.

The only incentive for highly complex products to exhist in the market place is the ability to monopolize the product to a certain extent. What is the point of selling the product if anyone can make it?

The point is that there are barriers of entry that every business uses to stay relevant. A patent is simply one barrier in a toolset of economic barriers.

Make no mistake, the monopoly google holds over search has fundamentally the same economic effect as a patent. Same with monopolies held by facebook, uber and apple all held without patents.

> The argument for patents is simple and clear: the alternative is broader use of trade secrets.

You forget “Benefit from state power to enforce it.” It is a subsidy from the taxpayer to private corporations, even if the patent holders participate a good share: lawyer fees at their expense, but judge salaries aren’t, and it keeps even the supreme courts busy - far from negligible. Guaranteeing patent owners that their implementation will never be used anywhere, and that the state offers this guarantee, is quite a nice gift, which could benefit everyone if people from all walks of life held patents.

If say, patents are mostly held by major corporations, then it is a subsidy from all taxpayers. Whereas trade secrets do not benefit from public enforcement. It is ok to protect everyone’s things because everyone has some, but the state still forbids holding a million dollars on the street because it would be too costly to protect. So we can say no to protecting virtual things when they are too costly for the public and when it distorts the market in favour of big corporations.

I'd have to agree. The author listed arguments and wrote as if those arguments, as phrased, are the only ones... which is a Strawman argument.

Many IPs likely wouldn't even exist if the 10 year monopoly didn't exist.

Yeah they patented some parts of DNA and there was a huge debate over it but that patent is almost expired now so the whole debate eventually becomes irrelevant.

It's worth it.

As long as they expire in reasonable time, unlike a certain mouse...

Mickey Mouse is obviously a loophole. The purpose of the law was not made to do this and the time limits are not unreasonable.

The problem you bring up is not a problem with the concept of IP. It is the problem of the exploitation of loop holes by lawyers and entities with enough money to pay these lawyers. It’s in the same class of problems as tax loopholes. You can’t ban the concept of tax simply because there are loopholes.

Not saying loopholes aren’t an issue. I’m just saying Mickey Mouse is an argument against loopholes, he is not an argument against the intent and purpose of Ip law in the US.

Yes I agree.

Nobody would invest billions in IP if someone from the street can walk by and take it.Is that such a complex subject to understand? IP is not a different concept than property.

People like to say "you can't actually steal IP, you get to keep yours". Of course you can steal IP, by using it or redistributing it without compensating the creator, you reduce the value of their IP. You stole from them by taking part of the value of the IP for yourself, robbing THEM from having it.

Scenario: an inventor invests 10 million for a product and makes 20 million in sales. He goes to invest the 10 million profit in his next invention.

Alternate scenario: an inventor invests 10 million for a product and makes 1 million in sales, because competitors use his IP for free and saturated the market. Inventor goes bankrupt.

Call it anything you want, but to me the competitors stole $19 million from the inventor. Yes, we can't predict the future, so it's harder to argue hypothetical situations. But seriously can't we put 2+2 together?

Plus IP expires. It's not like patents and so on forever stay the property if someone. Eventually they become available to everyone in all their documented and archived glory at the patent office.

> Nobody would invest billions in IP if someone from the street can walk by and take it.

Gross simplification. The simple fact you reason and write about this question is a direct consuequence of the free availability of IP to you : you learned to write, to compute, to think with books and a free incredibly huge flow of ideas.

You're basically seeing intellectual production as a thing that should be monetized. Most of IP is free fortunately.

> Plus IP expires.

Unless armies of legal teams make sure it doesn't.

I'm always surprised by the fact that many people advocate for free competing markets. But if you remove IP, then it's totally free competition : nobody gets the protection of IP, all players are on the same page. Then all of sudden "investors" don't want to invest anymore because there's not protection. Either those are not very brave, either they're not interested in making the world a better plus but rather interested in winning money because, hey we had a great idea, we _deserve_ to profit on it...

So, people will dump in the billions of dollars of investment developing drugs and getting them past human trials, only to have them immediately be stolen?

Removal of IP here means that you've enforced a penalty against innovators and creators, and baked incentives for grifting and leeching straight into the system. The system we have right now is flawed, but the remove all IP argument is even worse.

I'll also pre-empt the "But research is government funded" side tangent, getting the drug from a proof of concept/academic study to something that can actually be used is horrendously expensive, and this bit is completely in the domain of private industry. And if you think academia is going to replace that in this no-IP world, you might want to look into how the academia -> industry pipeline actually works.

On a more software side angle, I've found it interesting that the biggest anti-IP people I know also bemoan the general move over to SaaS.

The flaw with this argument is the assumption that incentives cannot exist towards innovation without IP protections. It's obvious why investors will seldomly invest in non-protected innovation: monopolies are just significantly more lucrative. Absent that incentive, are there no truly no alternatives? Was this assumption ever tested prior to these policies being implemented?

I think it's also worth asking why the available funding for innovation is almost exclusively in the hands of capitalists in the first place. Do they simply have superior business acumen, or are there protections / rent-seeking behaviors at play here?

I'll say this though. The answer to the first one is no, at least on a higher level. Most purple pursue things for their own self interest. Who would invest so much time, resources and effort solely for others gain. They might be great people, but they're rare. Allowing the innovators to profit from their creations nicely aligns incentives.

The problem here is that people love to pick at the current system, but ignore the flaws of their much treasured alternative.

I am extremely skeptical that there is no financial incentive to being first-to-market and building a reputation as an innovator, even at a "higher level", especially when these incentives are completely overshadowed by the ones created by IP. I don't believe all financial incentive disappears just because you eliminate the ability to rent-seek through a state-backed monopoly.

The problem here is that people also love to defend the current system, while actively prohibiting alternatives from ever taking root.

There is a difference between the concept of patents and copyright, and the very obviously broken implementation of that ideas that exists in society currently.

Saying there's no good reason for IP rights because lawyers can get their way by brute force, is like saying there's no good reason for anyone to ever eat pizza because the pizza place makes bad pizza. Please separate the implementation from the idea.

It's fair to argue that in our current court system and regulatory environment that removing IP protections would be better (i think that's debatable), but it seems intellectually dishonest to say there are no good reasons for IP at the conceptual level.

What you fail to understand is that investment in IP is not the goal, so saying it would no longer be invested in is non-convincing.

You have to actually prove that research would slow down but your hypothetical scenarios are not proof.

I can just as easily assert that investment and research would happen with or without temporary exclusive legal rights as. Market forces still push for improvement even without exclusivity.

Research the origins of IP. IP didn't exist forever. It was introduced because it was needed.

If you think this is subjective, let me ask you think: you have a popular YouTube channel, your content requires paying writers, actors, VFX teams and editors. Bunch of other people copy your content freely and legally and get most of the ad revenue.

You protest: you made this content, you paid for it. Please just link to me, not the copycats. Response "we can just as easily assert that you'd continue making videos anyway with or without other people copying you."

Kind of tonedeaf isn't it?

Look, eventually all our jobs will be producing IP. We'll have IP schematics to prints 3D printers which prints other 3D printers, which print robots which do all the work. I'm simplifying but basically that's the future of jobs. No one cares about your muscles, they only care about your brain. So, to say IP deserves no rights in the long-term means basically no one has jobs, and we have no economy.

If people truly value the effort you put in and appreciate you making more content for them they can always subscribe to your Patreon and give you money directly. No need to go through a platform that uses advertising. And if the content can be freely distributed there is no need to go watch it on a platform where someone is leeching large amounts of money through advertising, unless the platform itself provides some actual value.

3D printers is a bad example by the way, as one of the most successful 3D printing companies works completely opensource: https://github.com/prusa3d

Why do people still pay them a large sum for their printer when they can build one themselves or buy a cheap clone off of Aliexpress?

Your hypothetical scenario is silly: it relies on the dubious assumption that neither YouTube nor the viewers have any agency about who they give money to. The agency of the viewers was discussed in the other responses, so let's focus on the agency of YouTube.

Why would YouTube pay ad revenue to a "bunch of other people" in a hypothetical world where YouTube could freely and legally host a copy of the content themselves, and take all the ad revenue for themselves?

They have an incentive to pay something the creator (if they think that doing so would motivate them to create more content, and hence lead to more ad revenue in the future), but certainly not to a bunch of random people uploading the same content.

Your argument in favor of YouTube protecting IP rights basically applies 1:1 about the government protecting it.

You do realize if YouTube alone protected copyright, we'd have a NotYouTube clone setup within minutes where the copies and ads will go to, or not?

We have governments for this stuff, so we don't have to play whack-a-mole with copycats all over the internet and the world.

1. I didn't give an argument in favor of YouTube protecting IP rights.

2. No that argument is still silly. It does not work for the same reason: it assumes no agency on part of economic actors. The only way your hypothetical "NotYouTube" could stay in business vs. YouTube is by adding enough value that they actually get ad revenue. If people decide to advertise on "NotYouTube", to the extent that it is profitable to run "NotYouTube", then "NotYouTube" will have the exact same incentive to motivate content creators by sharing part of their ad revenue with them. The argument is precisely that these copycats are a net positive: coordinating against them (playing whack-a-mole) is a net negative, with or without governments.

> The only way your hypothetical "NotYouTube" could stay in business vs. YouTube is by adding enough value that they actually get ad revenue.

Well, they have the same content as YouTube for starters. So all they need is a slightly sexier or faster app, and they're done.

> "NotYouTube" will have the exact same incentive to motivate content creators by sharing part of their ad revenue with them.

"NotYouTube" doesn't have content creators. Why would they. They have YouTube's content.

See, the part you keep missing in your analysis is that without IP rights, NotYoutube doesn't need original content, full stop. It just needs to copy/paste YouTube's content. They don't have to share ad revenue with anyone.

You really need to think through the entire chain of events that'll unfold if we had no IP rights. Creators will no longer be someone you need to deal with. They're just the gullible idiots who made something on their own, for others to just take it and profit from it.

In a world without IP rights, content is worthless. So who would bother producing it? Let's figure that out. The only way for content producers to profit would be product placement deals. However the product placement should be inseparable from the content, because in a world without IP rights, anyone can just cut out the ads and sponsored messages from your content.

So what's the conclusion here? All content will be just... ads. Not videos WITH ads. But the videos themselves will be ads. Ads for products you can sell, as those are the only thing you can sell for money in a world without IP rights. Probably also political propaganda, as politicians can pay for that as well, and then embezzle it from the budget. That's going to be all of it. Wow, I just got sad imagining that.

> So all they need is a slightly sexier or faster app, and they're done.

YouTube is not just an app, it's a network that can distribute content along the lines of "200 million videos watched, 65k new videos uploaded per day", it's also the people who moderate it, it's also the people who market it, uptime and reliability, etc. And you'd have to beat YouTube on every single one of these to get at even a substantial fragment of those precious ad dollars.

Notice that your hypothetical "NotYouTube" does not have _any_ advantage over actual-YouTube in a world without IP. It's in the business of connecting advertisers to potential customers, just like YouTube, and to be able to do that, they need content that people watch. And hence, it has an incentive to support the creation of such content. Especially so if it becomes the market leader (by having a slightly sexier app, or larger reach, or less obtrusive ads, or better recommendations, or a nicer privacy policy, some other appeal^1): with that advantage, more people will watch the new content on their website than elsewhere, so it will be able to get more ad revenue from hosting it than its competitors.

There might be

> You really need to think through the entire chain of events that'll unfold if we had no IP rights.

Agreed. We should be especially careful not to: 1. assume that Econ 101 would also cease to apply, and that anyone would be able to make money by spinning up YouTube clones. If your dystopian vision was correct, Wikipedia would have been outcompeted by one of its ad-supported mirrors long ago.

^1 Note: All of these are QoL improvements for the users of the services. As long as there are many more content consumers than content creators (and there is overlap between the two categories), this may constitute a further argument against IP rights.

You keep saying they need original content people can watch. I don't know how many times I can explain the notion of "original content" loses meaning without IP rights.

Original content is an incentive because only the producer can host it. That's enforced by RIGHTS.

Without rights, if YouTube produces it, it ends up on NotYouTube. If NotYouTube produces, it ends up on YouTube. No rights, no original content. There's no incentive. You keep saying the incentive is so people go to the site to watch a particular video. But nothing keeps that video on that one site. IP rights do that currently.

If what you say is right, how far has ThePirateBay gone to produce original content? Oh that's right, they just take Hollywood content and ads flow just fine. That's the future you're fighting for.

> You keep saying the incentive is so people go to the site to watch a particular video. But nothing keeps that video on that one site.

No, that's not what I'm saying, and I don't know what gave you that idea. The phrase "original content" never even appeared in my comments!

People visit to online video platforms to watch videos. If there are no interesting videos, people don't visit online video platforms: they go and do something else with their time. And if people don't visit your online video platform, operators of online video platforms lose money, and go out of business. Consequently, operators of online video platforms have an incentive to ensure that interesting videos get made. This is true even when all videos are available on all the platforms. Same principle: one of my siblings operates a rural hotel, and regularly contributes to a fund promoting tourism in the region. Doing this is a net positive for her revenue, even though some (most!) of the tourists will not stay in that specific hotel when they visit the region, and some might stay in hotels that did not contribute to any such fund.

> If what you say is right, how far has ThePirateBay gone to produce original content?

TPB has to operate illegally, has an order of magnitude fewer visitors, and two orders of magnitude smaller revenue. They are not in the position to fund substantial original content, and those who accepted their money would risk prosecution. Despite all of that, TPB did fund a limited number of art projects in the past [1].

> Oh that's right, they just take Hollywood content and ads flow just fine. That's the future you're fighting for.

Heartbreaking injustice. No comment.

[1] https://wikileaks.org/gottfrid-docs/

Innovation existed before IP. To argue it would stop requires a lot of proof.

Your hypothetical scenarios rely on perpetuating the current ways to monetize but again, that isn't the goal. New ways would surface. The world would certainly be different but nothing about your arguments convince the reader that the world would be worse.

“Of course you can steal ip ... you reduce the value of their ip”. This is a circular argument, and invalid. Then default state is for ip to have no value. The only thing that gives it value is far-reaching laws that diminish the real property rights of anyone who owns a pen or hard disk. The existence of those laws cannot be an argument in favour of those laws.

By that same logic, why have property rights at all?

You invest to produce IP, to you this still results in "IP has no value by default".

So I guess investing to buy a house, also results in "this house has no value by default" by that same logic.

Scarce things have limited use.

Once you have eaten an apple, it cannot be eaten again.

If you plant a crop of wheat on your field this season, your brother cannot also plant a crop of barley there.

When you ride your bicycle to work for the day, your neighbour cannot ride the same bicycle to the gym at midday.

The quality of scarceness does not come from law, it is inherent.

Through owning your house, you get to decide what goes on there and have the use of it.

IP does not work that way because there is no inherent scarcity. A million and one people can listen to the same music track, and the first listener loses no value from its use by the other million.

It's full of empty houses and free land over the entire country.

If I live alone in a big house with 5 rooms, I could host at least 10-15 people there. They would surely rather live in that nice house, and not on the street.

What causes that scarcity that I live alone in a big house, while homeless people roam the streets? Property rights.

Property rights cause scarcity way before "natural scarcity" kicks in. To think otherwise is to lie to yourself.

The reason we can't rely just on natural scarcity is because it reduces us to living like animals. Rights protection, in balance, is what allows society to rise above a pile of people consuming everything to scarcity and filling everything to capacity, with no ability to take a long-term view other mere existence.

"If I live alone in a big house with 5 rooms, I could host at least 10-15 people there. They would surely rather live in that nice house, and not on the street."

Would it still be a nice house if 10-15 people with no kinship were crammed into it?

We can see from the way that people chose to spend and live that most people regard privacy as important to their idea of home.

"What causes that scarcity that I live alone in a big house, while homeless people roam the streets? Property rights."

No, scarcity is inherent, as explained earlier.

With your home example, the land itself is scarce. Somebody has invested to build and maintain the building. The house would quickly be ruined and stripped if not for care and property protections.

"Rights protection, in balance, is what allows society to rise above a pile of people consuming everything to scarcity and filling everything to capacity, with no ability to take a long-term view other mere existence."

At the start of the thread, you were using the language of real property to argue for IP. But here, you reveal that you are in fact opposed to real property.

> Would it still be a nice house if 10-15 people with no kinship were crammed into it?

You're currently arguing in favor of artificial scarcity through property rights. Are you sure that's your thesis. /s

> No, scarcity is inherent, as explained earlier.

There's nothing "inherent" in having the right to keep those 10-15 people away from your nice house.

I think you're so used to having the right of property, you can't even realize none of this is inherent. Rights, laws and law enforcement gave you that.

Without this artificial scarcity, there would be zero homeless people. And there would also be zero people owning houses.

But I'm sure nice houses will just keep being built anyway. /s

> At the start of the thread, you were using the language of real property to argue for IP. But here, you reveal that you are in fact opposed to real property.

I'm not opposed to real property at all. I'm just showing you what a world without property rights looks like. You seem to not like it. QED.

Its not the listener who we serve with intellectual property, its the creator. Of course the listener loses no value, because they in fact do not own the intellectual property, they possess the ability to benefit from it.

If there is no protection for intellectual property, its not the listener who loses utility, its the owner of the intellectual property who would like to be rewarded for his work.

The GP post had a sole purpose, to explain scarcity.

I was just correcting your statement that there is no inherent scarcity with intellectual property.

> Nobody would invest billions in IP if someone from the street can walk by and take it.

That's called a university. Such institutions are responsible for the vast majority of technical advances.

That's only one side of the story. The other side is someone gets a patent, doesn't build a thing that people can buy, and just tries to get money off someone who does want to do that.

People who are looking at making this thing then get scared of investing in the development of the product and then we're back to no investment.

I've literally seen this with my own eyes. A friend of mine is one of these guys who has a 3D printer and thinks about what to invent all day. He also spends a lot of time looking up patents and tosses out ideas that he thinks will cause a legal mess. It's a shame because I think we might be at a point where we need more people executing than dreaming up ideas.

That falls under point 5 - no real evidence, just thought experiments.

I don't really agree with that argument - 'real evidence' is always elusive - at some point we always have to do thought experiments - but I think you need to go a bit deeper. Your examples assume the business model of current copy right related businesses - it is obvious that in a world without copy rights they would not function, but that does not mean that we would not get the things that those businesses produce - they could be produced in other business models.

That argument it's not the reason why IP exist. The justification is that IP will create more value for society through incentives, not that the inventor would loss value. Otherwise you could justify eternal IP.

So, the only defense for IP is "it creates more value for society than the alternative". If we look into it, and the alternative is better (I don't know), the inventor should loss their privileges.

IP is not a right, it's a monopoly, a privilege given by law, and can be changed by law if judged not convenient anymore.

medicine have been produced for ages without IP law

Er... I think there's a fairly sizable difference between modern medicine, in which we can develop an effective cure for a pandemic within a year of the pandemic starting, and historical medicine in which the Black Death ravaged countries for years and was never cured, only adapted to after countless lives were lost.

I don't think the modern medical industry would work without IP law. You can maybe first-principles your way to an idea of a way to produce large amounts of novel, working medicine quickly without IP law, but that's at best theorycrafting and doesn't have a whole lot of evidence backing it up AFAIK. I'm not sure how many people would dedicate their lives to coming up with new medicines, funding enormous safety and efficacy trials, and publishing results if anyone could turn around and copy their work after they poured so much into it.

IP law has probably extended too far into software, but I think the argument for its use in medicine is fairly decent.

> I think there's a fairly sizable difference between modern medicine, in which we can develop an effective cure for a pandemic within a year of the pandemic starting, and historical medicine

Yes, there is a difference, and it's striking.

For example, despite the pandemic the wealthy countries have voted overwhelmingly against waiving patents on the long-needed vaccine: https://www.msf.org/countries-obstructing-covid-19-patent-wa...

> I don't think the modern medical industry would work without IP law.

No. Modern medical industry preys on IP law.

Yes, there is a difference, and it's striking.

For example, despite the pandemic the wealthy countries have voted overwhelmingly against waiving patents on the long-needed vaccine

Correct. In modern times, the countries that developed the vaccine are insisting on getting paid for it. In historical times, vaccines didn't exist and everyone died when a pandemic struck.

The reason the countries that developed the vaccines voted against waiving patents is precisely because they believe that IP is required for the modern medical industry to function. The historical alternative to IP law is trade secrets, which is much worse for medicine, which has made its advancements on the back of researchers publishing and sharing their work. And with trade secrets, even assuming that the mRNA research and development necessary had somehow been funded and done entirely in-house since no one would be publishing it, still Pfizer would demand to be paid for its vaccines, and no one could copy them because they wouldn't have told anyone how to make them.

Yes. "Insisting to be paid" for a vaccine to combat global pandemic.

If you don't see an issue with that, then you need to amend the following:

> In historical times, vaccines didn't exist and everyone died when a pandemic struck.

Amendment: now it's the poor countries who die.

> The historical alternative to IP law is trade secrets

Yes, historically it is. But it's shades and shades of possibilities between "you pay, or you die" and "you pay, or you die, but for different reasons"

> develop an effective cure for a pandemic within a year of the pandemic starting [...] You can maybe first-principles your way to an idea of a way to produce large amounts of novel, working medicine quickly without IP law, but that's at best theorycrafting and doesn't have a whole lot of evidence backing it up AFAIK

Are you aware that an effective Oxford COVID vaccine was developed by a university without the pharma industry IP protection and funding? Are you aware that it is being manufactured by multiple pharma companies at-cost?

Believe it or not, quite a few people are motivated to help fellow humans survive a pandemic even if does not create shareholder value or a billion-dollar patent portfolio.

Oxford, like all research universities, owns and enforces IP. It does have "IP protection" and is an important part of the pharma industry.

Oxford, their partners AstraZeneca, as well as Johnson & Johnson (the latter two being pharma companies!) have all committed to distributing at cost — but not at a loss. They want to get paid back. The way they're getting paid back is because they can enforce IP law. If anyone could copy them without paying, as the author is proposing, they would not be able to sustain this kind of research.

At cost is very different than not enforcing IP law. IP law is required for "at cost." Otherwise it's distributed at a loss.

the covid vaccine was not developed for profit, it was developed because the alternative was the literal end of the world as we know it. they'd been sitting on the tech for thirty years because it was not profitable, in fact

https://www.salon.com/2021/01/24/the-hero-biochemist-who-pio...

and now that it's finished it's immediately applicable to all kinds of diseases that currently and historically have generated massive amounts of damage but were also not profitable to prevent. including but not limited to hiv, malaria, and a number of cancers

https://academictimes.com/first-vaccine-to-fully-immunize-ag...

https://www.fiercebiotech.com/research/biontech-ceo-turns-co...

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/371/6525/145

https://techcrunch.com/2021/01/11/moderna-is-developing-thre...

https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/covid-19-scientist-mrna-cance...

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32716975/

https://phys.org/news/2021-02-mrna-vaccine-cancer-immunother...

i would suggest you've simply picked a bad example to make your point but there are quite a lot of bad examples.

medicine is invented because humans don't like to suffer, or see others suffer. property and profit don't have much to do with that beyond being the current framework to get things manufactured and keep researchers from becoming destitute. and they don't seem to be serving that function well.

they'd been sitting on the tech for thirty years because it was not profitable

So what you're saying is... If there had been a profit incentive, they wouldn't have sat on it? That seems like a strong argument for the profit motive: if you make it unprofitable, it doesn't get acted on.

That being said, I actually don't think your claim of "they'd been sitting on the tech for thirty years because it was not profitable" is supported by the Salon article you posted. Instead it says that a young researcher got frequent pushback in the 90s on a possibly-promising, but not fully-developed idea that turned out to be correct, because it was viewed as too novel or as unworkable. And in fact, in the 90s, it actually was unworkable. She didn't figure out how to make it work even theoretically until 2005.

That doesn't mean the pushback was right — although many breakthroughs have gotten pushback before being proven correct. But it's definitely incorrect to claim that it was sat on for thirty years "because it was unprofitable." Thirty years ago it did not work because they hadn't yet discovered the nucleoside modifications necessary for the human immune system not to immediately destroy mRNA vaccines. It wasn't even theoretically possible until 2005. And in less than a decade of proving it was theoretically possible she was hired away from UPenn by BioNTech to work on productionizing her work on mRNA vaccines — which had still never been successfully made before in humans. In less than a decade since, they have made a successful mRNA vaccine for COVID.

So, I guess what I'm saying is, I think the system mostly worked out? It could have been smoother but it does seem to have succeeded.

Sure, i simplified a bit. They kicked her legs out from under her for thirty years. The researcher claims being denied funding as early as 1989.

>So what you're saying is... If there had been a profit incentive, they wouldn't have sat on it? That seems like a strong argument for the profit motive: if you make it unprofitable, it doesn't get acted on.

It's only an argument if you believe not acting on it was a correct decision. I think the multiplicity of mRNA applications that are immediately following now that we’re past the hurdle of the first one, and the huge amount of damage these vaccines and therapies will prevent or mitigate to literally millions of human lives, including preventing countless deaths (malaria alone kills about half a million every year), indicate that this is an extremely beneficial technology that should have been aggressively pursued before a global pandemic forced the issue.

>Instead it says that a young researcher got frequent pushback in the 90s on a possibly-promising, but not fully-developed idea that turned out to be correct, because it was viewed as too novel or as unworkable. And in fact, in the 90s, it actually was unworkable. She didn't figure out how to make it work even theoretically until 2005.

>That doesn't mean the pushback was right — although many breakthroughs have gotten pushback before being proven correct.

Yes, this is bad. The stonewalling of promising treatments that are not fully developed is entirely contrary to the point of medical research. Novelty and difficulty are the kind of problems that resolve into possibility or impossibility only with the application of research and trials. The year 2005 is still early enough to have massively changed many lives, and it may have been sooner if they were not impeded.

>So, I guess what I'm saying is, I think the system mostly worked out? It could have been smoother but it does seem to have succeeded.

It was allowed to succeed only once it became apparent there was no other choice. Capitalism does not get to take credit for being dragged across the finish line by the biggest mass mortality event in decades.

BioNTech hired her to work on mRNA in 2013. That's a fair amount of historical revisionism to say it only happened because of COVID. If they hadn't started until 2020, there's no way they would've been one of the first two companies to develop a successful vaccine. Productionizing takes years.

While I agree with most of this comment (the covid vaccine is the result of the world working for the betterment of society, succeeding where the "profit" motivation has utterly failed), the idea that HIV, malaria, and cancer such have not been treated because they're not "profitable" to cure has always struck me as verging on conspiracy. The first company to produce a definitive cure would no doubt make billions in profit. The problem is specifically with mRNA vaccines: the cost of research into it was so high with little guaranteed payoff.

The problem was that the risk-reward calculation was showing that none of the money invested into mRNA vaccines had turned a profit yet, so despite the promise of the technology and the fact that medicine at large would greatly benefit from a single breakthrough vaccine, no single company was willing to put in the investment since they wouldn't reap the full rewards. IP incentivizes selfish behavior, not collective behavior.

IP is designed to preserve the status quo - for rich countries to remain rich and for poor countries to remain poor.

That's why every country that successfully moved from poor to rich - did so by ignoring patents and other forms of IP.

Philosophical arguments make no difference, money talk. If you're poor you can't get rich without using other people's IP for free. So you will. If you're rich you have nothing to lose and everything to gain by supporting strict IP laws - so you will.

The approval of a patent registration request should work like this:

The issuer provides a public description of the problem the patent solves and a secret description of the solution. They pay $10k in advance to request a patent registration.

The patent institution then publishes the public problem description. External challengers can submit additional solutions for $100. After some time (e.g. a month) submission closes and independent judges need to identify the solution proposed by the patent issuer out of all submitted solutions. If they succeed, the patent will be registered. Otherwise, the submitter of the identified solution gets a split of the patent registration fee (e.g. $2k) and registration is denied.

The institution manages hundreds of possible judges, only a few are selected randomly by a trusted computer. If a selected judge correctly identifies the solution of the patent, they will get a bonus (more than challengers would get, e.g. $3k). Non-selected judges can submit challenging solutions.

This should be robust against bribery and prevent low effort bullshit patents!?

If a company wants to bribe judges, they need to identify the selected judges, otherwise they help not-selected judges to submit challenging solutions. This can be made very hard.

Also, the solution of the patent should solve a hard problem (i.e. a problem that is hard to find solutions for). Otherwise, challengers can easily come up with solutions of equivalent quality.

If the problem is "A mechanism to visually indicate progress", it should not be too hard to come up with the progress bar.

> They pay like $10k to test their patent.

Cool, so patents are (even more so) for rich people exclusively. Also, what you're describing soudns a lot like the existing system to me, but with more upfront money.

How can ordinary people challenge patent registrations in a fair way? It is easy to claim that a solution is trivial, but it is almost impossible to prove that if you know the solution already.

Feel free to adapt the sums I listed, that would not change the procedure. I do think that there should be a decent financial burden to protect an idea though. If your idea is good, you can still borrow money (or split patent revenue with investors).

Yes, I suppose my judgment was too harsh, sorry - I don't have a better solution, I just think it's an extremely difficult problem, perhaps not one that's solvable in a financial system like what exists today.

Lost me in the first paragraph.

There probably are legitimate arguments against IP (and patents and copyright are explicitly not property, anyway -- the whole field of law is dishonest to the core) but I know at the outset I won't find them here.

"There are No Good Arguments for Intellectual Property"

Oh yes there are! As Cory Doctorow has suggested, the average person couldn't care less about intellectual property/copyright, and this has always been so. Thus, you're never going to see people out demonstrating on the street over it.

The argument for intellectual property is that with most of the population AWOL over the matter, the few who do care are free to lobby politicians to strengthen IP and then proceed to rip us off with even further impunity. And I'm sure they consider our collective ambivalence a damn good argument for keeping it.

There is a certain amount of demand for intellectual property, it clearly has a reason to exist. The problem is that it is completely inflexible. There are entities that "need" 100 years of copyright, but the vast majority don't.

The government is forcing a one size fits all solution designed for special interests at the expense of the majority. That's where the problem lies.

This post is really low quality. The author has made no serious effort to articulate the arguments in favor of intellectual property.

If humanity needs to solve broader problems like climate change, poverty etc. global reformation of IP laws is must. This is the only way global south can afford some new tech and increase adoption.

However the dirty secret is no country or institution will willingly give up whatever it considers its competitive advantage, as simple as that.

While i agree that property rights are usually excessive, i doubt the author has ever spent hours crafting their own artwork and had someone use it for their advertising without the courtesy of asking.

With a headline like that, we can just close up shop and move on, no thinking needed! All joking aside, how did something like that make it to the front page?

Yeah you're not alone in wondering that. I was expecting more substance to this article, not just single-sentence responses to a few straw-manned arguments.

Best not read on, else you might encounter reasoning like "[These arguments] are all flawed, since libertarianism is right". Well, it is the Von Mises blog...

Summary: all my inputs should be free and I should be paid 6 or even 7 figures for sticking them together

There are many things that bear little sense in the absolute, but are a pillar of the world we live in. IP rights are one of them.

The part that strikes me the most is the following: "proponents of IP say that without it we wouldn't have movies and medicine, but we had both for centuries without IP". That's just false.

True, we had art in the Past, but it was a different time: in the Middle Age everything was the King's property, and before him, God's. The critical point is that the business model was different: we relied on rich families to cover the costs. Dante's Commedia was covered by the pockets of the Lords of Ravenna (and the Church). Virgil? Covered by the pockets of Maecenas (and Augustus). Wanna have democracy and equality? Capitalism is the only business model proven capable of sustaining that.

Same goes for medicine, that by the way never reached any meaningful scale before science, IP and capitalism came along.

The author seems less interested in getting the facts right and more interested in pushing forward their political point of view.

"Same goes for medicine, that by the way never reached any meaningful scale before science, IP and capitalism came along."

How did the Oxford/Astrazeneca vaccine come about, and at the low price that it did?

By Fiscal Activism by the UK government.

That's how basic science, research and development comes about - by government fiscal activism making the results freely available. Once that breaches a risk threshold the private sector will jump on it and accelerate the innovation from it. The existence of the Internet shows the power of that approach.

I think we can still have intellectual property rights even in this context. Some things are worth working on at a national level, like the vaccine, but that doesn't have to be an argument in abolishing all IP rights. We don't have to nationalize pop music for instance, heck it doesn't even make sense to do this.

The arguments for IP (and intangible personal property more generally) are the same as for property in general: giving those who take action which produces value exclusive rights in the value producing thing promotes development of value which benefits the community.

That’s not to say I don’t understand the arguments for generally more limited property rights, but I find right-libertarian, generally property-rights-maximalists, arguing against IP to be…well, not actually surprising given that that faction generally has a fairly arbitrary deontological [0] conception of property rights.

[0] That is, the specific parameters of property rights are fairly directly axiomatic rather than something rationally grounded in a simpler set of general principles.

“action which produces value exclusive rights...” This does not describe “property in general”. (Also, it is gobbledegook.) The concept of property (excluding ip) is extremely straightforward - control of something scarce. Things called IP are not inherently scarce, and the arguments used to justify it are plainly not the same.

> “action which produces value exclusive rights...” This does not describe “property in general”. (Also, it is gobbledegook.)

Yes, in isolation that excerpt which cuts across parts of different phrases from the middle of a sentence is gobbledygook which describes nothing.

Other than being a good illustration of why sentences are meaningful units but arbitrarily selected excerpts from the middle of them are not, I’m not sure what your point is.

>libertarianism is right

Says who, you? Treating that as some kind of axiom makes everything else a terrible argument

You cant prove a negative !

There's zero substance to this is quick blog.

> artworks and medicine have been produced for ages without IP law;

This is bullshit. What are they even talking about? I think medicine and movies/art and IP were invented around the same time. Last 100 may be 200 years years.

In our 100,000 year history that links them pretty well.

Wikipedia - "The modern concept of intellectual property developed in England in the 17th and 18th centuries"

That's obviously older than medicine. Are they including leaches and prayer and birth control which is just a light dose of poison? Well good luck to their world were you die at 40 and art is a few shitty books you'll never get to read.

I assume they build on other crappy (10 year old) blogs and think living in the old days was amazing where everyone lived to 90, because the 'infants' died young that they had such a low life expectancy and everyone had split sleeps and short work days.

Lots of countries have little enforcement of Intellectual Property. What are their living conditions like? How many good local movies do they make? (And if you say Nollywood, you have to explain how it's not just a gangsta related flex)

It's hard to distinguish correlation from causation. If a country imports more IP than it exports, then enforcing IP laws quite clearly bleeds money from it. If citizens spend money on local non-IP industries instead of foreign IPs, the country has more money. But if the local IP industry is strong enough, it can bring money from other countries, and local IP enforcement can help support the industry that brings potential foreign money inflow. That is, assuming IP "enforcement" increases money spent on IP, which isn't always the case.

This comment is the single most compelling argument why STEM must include liberal arts/humanities studies

You will find most STEM people do 'liberal arts/humanities studies' because it reduces our workload and gets us high distinctions.

I got trouble because they saw me 'hacking' the system a bit working them in.

Yeah, and you are the prime example of that: fully ignorant of history.

I wonder how the author would feel about me copying & pasting their article to a few different websites (such as Medium.com), and then collecting both the financial proceeds & the credit.

At the bottom of the page:

> To the extent possible under law, Stephan Kinsella has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to C4SIF. This work is published from: United States. In the event the CC0 license is unenforceable a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License is hereby granted.

Seems quite clear that the author would encourage that and be glad of it. There's a CC0 license at the bottom.

Apparently the license the author chose requires attribution. I am assuming that their stance against IP rights means that they are willing to forego attribution.

CC0 doesn't require attribution, it's effectively public domain.

lol @ three downvotes for asking a question relevant to the article

Ahh HN & tech world, so many snowflakes

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