Digital artifacts require a new non-exclusive property market scheme (to be determined; it's a difficult problem). Enforcing the older paradigm with laws and coercion is not a long term solution.
The problem with intellectual property (I might be mixing copyright and intellectual property here, if I am, my apologies) is that by preventing derivative works while also having a near infinite lifespan, it absolutely crushes any kind of creative innovation. IMO the lifespan of intellectual property should be 40-50 years, reduced when going to market, similar to how drug patents work. This lets smaller creators who don't have the vast war chests of literal drug companies to make a good living off of it, while still allowing for innovation for the next (or next next) generation.
The REAL problem is that Disney and such have been lobbying for extending copyright and IP protections. I think we're up to nearly 100 years now.
We might get more cross overs too (x men vs teen titans)
For the most part Disney has done a good job with Marvel films, and one can easily find many "arthouse" films which are just awful.
Yet, for an author, the real money is in the film rights. If they are commercially motivated, the books themselves are an afterthought.
For other things the case is less clear.
For instance fighting between Curtis Aircraft and the Wright Brothers held back the U.S. Aircraft industry for a decade until the Government saw it being a crisis in WWI.
Patents in tech from what I know are valid for 20 years and that includes all countries that operate with PCT (patent cooperation treaty)
Most countries you could think off operate within PCT laws.
While I had heard about the Mickey Mouse treaty I never dug into it too much, there are different patent for different stuff I think the personal protection characters that are the face of something (like Mickey Mouse) are some of the most outrageous long term patent.
But for technology most patent only last 20 years and while I won't get into the nitty gritty of how patent protection works its mostly done to protect big companies from spending alot of money on RnD and then having there competitors steal the done invention and profit from it.
Big techs are in general lenient when a pop a mom shop infringes on an ip within the 20 years period.
Just wanted to clear things up, most inventions that you guys could think up that would be patentable are only for 20 years not 100.
Noob question:
Why aren't patents treated like govt issued licenses, leases?
Want exclusive use of airwaves, water, mining, catchy song, clever idea, whatever? Terrific. Pay up.
Set the price at just over reasonable. To prevent people from frivolously camping on stuff to exclude others from using it.
Economists are smart about setting price. Auctions for stuff that's hard to price (airwaves). Boilerplate for bog standard stuff (trademarks, songs). Whatever works. With some clever veto points to thwart regulatory capture.
Unrestricted copying would discourage quite a few projects being started due to not having any chance to recoup investment.
While IP may be a flawed tool at times, it still is a useful tool.
https://cepr.net/report/the-artistic-freedom-voucher-interne...
Can you imagine if copyright law allowed for things as broad as: “A novel or series of novels where a boy is educated at a school for wizards”. That’s what amazons 1-click patent was like. It was more or less: we will allow a client device to send both a product id and a user id by clicking a button, that will then cause a purchase to be made for that product and client. That patent caused something as trivial as “buy now” to be locked up by Amazon for years.
I don't recall e-commerce being hamstrung by it. Do you have any more information on some cases where the patent was actually leveraged?
There's really no need for a "non-exclusive property market scheme"[0] either. The whole point of restricting copying is to make money move out of your wallet and to publishers and creators. The problem we have is that the copyright monopoly lasts far longer than what's needed to pay for the production of new creative works, so we're rewarding ownership of existing ones which is contrary to the point of the law.
[0] I'm assuming this is code for something akin to, but not exactly like, NFTs.