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Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

There are arguments in favour of IP law, but it is difficult to escape from the fact - intentional outcome, really - that it puts barriers in front of people making the most sensible decision based on the current state of knowledge.

The more time passes, the more advantages accrue to open source software. It has been a true privilege to watch as the concept went from lunatic rantings to such an obvious pillar of the software industry that people in a workplace have to justify and argue for why they can't just run postgres on linux.

We've seen it a few times now - if a society wants to actually make progress they loosen IP restrictions. Fast progress happens when people are free to make good decisions.

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And the arguments in favour are often based on feelings and/or the vested interests of the current owners of "intelectual property". I think that basically it is immoral to prevent the progress of global useful knowledge of science and engineering.

If there are reasons to do so, they should be very strong and well proven, and be applied with utmost caution.

Today, it seems rather that IP law is blindly extended and strengthened besed upon fake arguments. The real argument is just protecting vested interests and locking out competition and innovation.

This excludes trademark law, which is not really IP but more to protect buyers against fakes and inferior copies. Therefore that can be necessary and useful, if not pushed too far.

Loose IP restrictions are a good policy when you are playing "catch-up" and basically need to implement a bunch of things already developed by someone else.

For an advanced country that actually has to create new things, the cost:benefits shifts in favour of more IP then the earlier stage. It's still possible to have too much restriction though, I think the copyright duration is ridiculous for example.

Do the benefits actually change though? Or does the country now have established industries and companies with the power to influence the political process in order to cement their position against new entrants via IP laws?

All of these factors exist, but their relative importance and value is situational.

Loosening IP restrictions would have first-order benefits to a lot of people who could now do things with existing IP that were previously impossible.

The downsides would be delayed and second-order: a significant portion of people, who currently invest in developing IP with the expectation of "owning" the resulting product, would reduce their level of investment. Why invest in R&D if you can just wait for someone else to find a successful idea and then copy them?

Why spend a billion dollars testing a drug if its market price is immediately dropped to generic level by cheap manufacturers? The only option left is secrecy, which is worse for society than patents.

A common argument, and yet not 9ne based on empirical data. The idea that not having intellectual monopolies would reduce investment over the long term simply fails to show any evidence for it.

Furthermore the arguments used for it, can also be used in regards to any investment with high costs and ease of replicability. Even something as simple as a rice farm would be able to justify a monopoly over selling rice in a region in that manner, after all, it's a lot cheaper to simply import it from elsewhere once the market demand for it has been established by the farm.

Some things can't be tested empirically [0] and we must rely on our reasoning faculties, that's life.

I'm saying, for some investors (I did say a significant portion, perhaps the quantity can't be verified), IP ownership is a factor in their decision making. Are you saying it doesn't for anyone? It's a different thing to argue that the "aggregate" level of investment across the whole economy would be unchanged. That's a different issue, and anyway the nature of any investment would be affected by changes in the law.

On the second point yes, the argument can be extended to absurdity but the scope of the patent system is a judgement made by legislators, which should (absent corruption) be based on a judgement of its relative benefits/disbenefits.

[0] Parachute use to prevent death and major trauma when jumping from aircraft: randomized controlled trial https://www.bmj.com/content/363/bmj.k5094

The interest on the British dye patents was paid in German poison gas.

If the UK had not strangled that sector of their economy the Germans would have never gotten the industrial know how to make a thousand tons of chlorine a month in 1915.

> For an advanced country that actually has to create new things, the cost:benefits shifts in favour of more IP then the earlier stage.

This is a myth; a very destructive myth.

To quote professor Mazzucato:

”According to conventional wisdom, innovation is best left to the dynamic entrepreneurs of the private sector, and government should get out of the way. But what if all this was wrong? What if, from Silicon Valley to medical breakthroughs, the public sector has been the boldest and most valuable risk-taker of all?

[Mazzucato] comprehensively debunks the myth of a lumbering, bureaucratic state versus a dynamic, innovative private sector. In a series of case studies—from IT, biotech, nanotech to today’s emerging green tech — Professor Mazzucato shows that the opposite is true: the private sector only finds the courage to invest after an entrepreneurial state has made the high-risk investments. In an intensely researched chapter, she reveals that every technology that makes the iPhone so ‘smart’ was government funded: the Internet, GPS, its touch-screen display and the voice-activated Siri.

Mazzucato also controversially argues that in the history of modern capitalism the State has not only fixed market failures, but has also actively shaped and created markets. In doing so, it sometimes wins and sometimes fails. Yet by not admitting the State’s role in such active risk taking, and pretending that the state only cheers on the side-lines while the private sector roars, we have ended up creating an ‘innovation system’ whereby the public sector socializes risks, while rewards are privatized.” [1]

Also, what is your definition for 'advanced country’? Are you talking about global north countries like the US, UK etc.?

What you likely see as making up an 'advanced country’ I see as global north imperialist institutions designed for gatekeeping and withholding important knowledge; and denying all of the working class access to our inheritance - a process that Ha-Joon Chang calls 'kicking away the ladder' [2].

> It's still possible to have too much restriction though, I think the copyright duration is ridiculous for example.

If you're only critiquing copyright - and not patents, trade secrets and others - what do you personally see as the redeemable parts of those other forms of IP (and the systems used to enforce them)?

We're in an age where instantaneous digital planetary replication and transmission technologies could give birth to an enormous collaborative web of cooperation, at an incredible near-zero marginal cost; which would enable the working class to get on the same page globally (and stay there) in order to further develop technologies in a beautiful mutually-beneficial dance (described more by people like Steele [3], as well as many socialist/marxist researchers [4]).

Why is it, according to you, beneficial to continue to have the private-property enforcing capitalist state hand out monopolies to profit-seeking entities/capitalist firms, which gives them 'ownership' over decontextualized/siloed scientific knowledge and technology and allows them to prosecute other humans for using this (or ‘their’) commoditized knowledge? In the end all knowledge is derivable and re-derivable, which is why many discoveries in the past were made in tandem in different (unconnected) places around the world [5]. Many forget this.

Scientific discoveries are essentially 'built into' the universe, and I believe they emerge at the right time for us to tackle the biggest challenges of our times (now climate change + 6th mass extinction event). Back on topic: does this mean those who make new discoveries are lone geniuses? No, not even close; they build on the things left by behind by those who came before. Yet unfortunately the capitalist lone genius myth is the predominant (and harmful) story of our time. [6]

What bottlenecks do you see for an emergent open, universally accessible, scientific commons-centered world? A world that doesn't allow the commodification and monopolization of our shared inheritance?

I think humanity has been waiting for patterns to emerge that allow for radically participative, distributed and open collective sense-making systems. I believe that the organizational patterns that help to remedy the current collective challenges have finally started to emerge in the form of http://valueflo.ws and holochain. I'm talking about intricate distributed systems that do a much better job of meeting the high level of variety in our world, and which allow us to govern our global commons without compromising on individual agency, as today’s systems do.

Our world today is divided in two: the working class and the propertied class. The propertied class unfairly dominate by 1.) having created knowledge hierarchies by setting up harmful artificial-scarcity -enabling systems of law - in effect weaponing knowledge, as well as 2.) having created undemocratic and private systems and symbols for measuring and communicating/expressing wealth, in the form of a.) siloed capitalist resource measuring systems (through capitalist Enterprise Resource Planning software that obscures economic human relations), and b.) centrally controlled and centrally issued currencies instead of mutual credit systems and protocols that allow mutual issuance and evolution (hence why I linked to Valueflo.ws, since it uses the Resources-Events-Agents ontology).

In other words: so far, today's systems are violent capital-enabling straightjackets because we have not been able to “encode as much variety as exists in the system it wants to control” (the system I’m referring to here being our global interconnected civilization) [7]. The cybernetic concept described above is called Ashby’s ‘law of requisite variety’ which I first learned about through Eric Harris-Braun, one of the people who stumbled on this novel pattern for fully distributed protocols now known as holochain, which “combines ideas from BitTorrent and Git, along with cryptographic signatures, peer validation, and gossip.“.

[1] https://marianamazzucato.com/books/the-entrepreneurial-state

[2] https://anthempress.com/kicking-away-the-ladder-pb

[3] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/j...

[4] https://tribunemag.co.uk/2019/01/abolish-silicon-valley

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_discovery

[6] https://www.technologyreview.com/2015/08/04/166593/techs-end...

[7] https://eric.harris-braun.com/blog/2007/12/07/id-58

This is a not-very-coherent ideological tirade against capitalism, and you haven't addressed the issue of IP protections value or not directly.

Sure, yet maybe consider posting some of your arguments which challenge or refute the arguments I shared instead of labeling it as an "ideological tirade" and offering very little substance in your comment?

> you haven't addressed the issue of IP protections value or not directly.

What value do you believe they offer? And for who?

It's not incumbent on commentators here to deconstruct long ideological tirades that run way off-topic.

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