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Comment by foob | Hacker News Reader

Intellectual property reform could be a solution. It sounds like they might have gone with ethanol if they weren't motivated by patents so that they could prevent free market competition. We see the same thing with pharmaceuticals and in many other industries. I'm not particularly convinced that intellectual property laws are anywhere close to a net positive for consumers or society at large.

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Patents, but also copyright on software. We gain nothing by rewriting the software every time, OSS should be the default. Same for music. It’s more controversial but Spotify is monetizing convenience, not music, which itself is available for free on P2P.

It's not controversial, it's the whole point of capitalism.

I hear this frequently, but I don’t think it will do what many people think it would.

Part of the power of FOSS is that it often leans on copyright to compel sharing. But, in the absence of copyright, why wouldn’t capitalistic powers simply stop sharing their code?

I think the gp post was not suggesting “get rid of copyright and leave oss unprotected” - by “OSS should be the default” i read that it should continue to be protected while copyright is removed. It would not be hard for new laws to enshrine + protect OSS licenses

> it should continue to be protected while copyright is removed. It would not be hard for new laws to enshrine + protect OSS licenses

Those things are logical opposites. If someone has a right to place any conditions at all on the way people copy their software, that is a copyright.

Maybe they meant to suggest copyright reform.

I make this point because people often like that GPL forces republishing of derivative works. This is an exercise of copyright, not a lack of it.

They're only opposite goals in as much as you see copyright and open source licenses as synonymous. I'm not a lawyer, but there are other forms of IP protections that are not copyright (patents, trademarks, etc). Seems like a new form of IP protection could be created to protect open source - i.e. "if someone says you can only modify this code if you re-share it, it is illegal to modify the code without re-sharing".

I understand what you are saying, but that simply is copyright under a different name. You are suggesting that someone should have the rights to control how others may copy their work: copyright.

I’m not sure that removing IP from the equation would have wholly changed the situation. There are other ways to control markets and they likely would have leaned on them instead.

Do you have any examples?

The obvious example in my mind is a control of the means of production. For instance, if they used [x] instead and also happened to own all the [x] mines.

Or using anticompetitive practices to prevent competitors from joining the market.

Or by gaining regulatory capture.

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