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Comment by thot_experiment | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, I think you're kinda hitting the nail on the head here. The idea that people should be allowed to control ideas or concepts is wrong. We need to move past this as a species, so much of what is relevant to the day to day lives of people on this planet exists in a world where scarcity is artificial. That's not okay. Artificial scarcity is not something we should allow.

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Copyright law does not protect abstract ideas or concepts. It protects specific artistic expressions of them. See https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ01.pdf; there's also a whole body of law around this.

> Artificial scarcity is not something we should allow.

Unfortunately, unless we're all going back to a society in which people can only produce things that are physically scarce, like food, we need artificial scarcity so that people can produce things that are valuable but not physically scarce so that they can buy those things that actually are scarce.

You're making a huge logical leap assuming that artificial scarcity is the only reason that we produce non-physical goods, and that's easily contradicted by the existence of FOSS. There are plenty of creators who create things for all sorts of reasons besides profit. And in many cases, there are people who want to create free things and can't because of things like patents and IP trolls preventing them from doing it.

> that artificial scarcity is the only reason that we produce non-physical goods

(Emphasis mine.) Who said that? Certainly not me.

Acts of charity happen all the time, and we are doubtless better off for them. But those are a choice. It doesn't mean it should be the only choice.

Here:

> Unfortunately, unless we're all going back to a society in which people can only produce things that are physically scarce, like food, we need artificial scarcity

You said that unless we have artificial scarcity, we are all going back to a society where people only produce physically scarce things.

Charity isn't somehow the only other choice, not that this would be my ideal solution but I think we could still have some working version of capitalism where intellectual property was greatly undermined and everyone was better off for it.

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