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Comment by jesterson | Hacker News Reader

There should be a fine line in intellectual property rights. I see where you are coming from - quite often intellectual property is used a a moat to protect insane revenues and, as a repercussion, delay or slowdown our progress as humanity.

But it is also use to protect unique creator revenue and encourage to create more.

If you ask where the fine line should be I have no immediate answer, but abolishing intellectual property rights just like enforcing them at all costs doesn't seem to be the optimal course of action to me.

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> But it is also use to protect unique creator revenue and encourage to create more.

This thinking is an artifact of an economic system so dependent on scarcity for its motivation that it is now generating most of the scarcity in the world.

We now have the technology for creative implementations of "From each according to its ability, to each according to its needs". Just keep track of how much each thing is used, and reward creators from a corporate-tax-funded pool. Every for-profit entity contributes proportionally to its profit, and can use any idea for free.

Even just having substantial "prizes" for the most widely used stuff (whether publicly or privately funded) would go a long way. (Most of our public funding for content creation now happens as grants, basically rewarding compelling ideas and then simply trusting that the reward money will be spent on doing worthwhile things. This does not work very well, for obvious reasons.)

What you say was partially implemented in USSR. It killed any productivity because author (inventor) is discouraged from doing more. Why bother?

Well said. The reality is that even in our current work without copyrigh a lot of value is added by creators who never see any real reward for it. Yet instead looking at how we can better reward creators we continue with continue with this insane system that has been shown be easily abused to concentrate wealth while having a massive cost for society by restricting what we all do and making everyone pay for enforcing those restrictions.

I think that's pretty much the case for shortening time frame of IP rights. Which means, they shouldn't be treated as property has been traditionally treated. Although as a socialist, I think perhaps we shouldn't have time unlimited property rights (above certain reasonable boundary, say $10M) in general.

Interesting, but being very opposite of socialist myself I am wholeheartedly with you here on limiting timeframe of IP. It partially solves the problem.

And this arguably should be extended to tangible assets as well - I like Singapore model where housing property is sold for specific timeframe. It simplifies a lot of redevelopment.

Something like the homestead principle?

Not precisely so.

We tend to think of ownership as in absolute owning of an asset for indefinite time. For a lot of things in Singapore you can ownership (i.e. own it) in that sense, but after sone time you have either to return it or stop using (rendering it useless). This applies to assets like homes, cars, etc.

If it’s not feasible to enforce those policies, government just imposes hefty tax on assets, ensuring you extract (or contribute) sufficient added value from asset.

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