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Comment by stormdennis | Hacker News Reader

After 10 years should farmers have to give away their land for free too?

Farmers have to put in constant work to generate revenue. "IP" revenue too often entails create-once-earn-forever. However, "IP" often has a higher upfront investment attached to it, and often is not (as) "scalable", unlike farming.

What I am trying to say is that both things are very different in details where it matters, so I think this is a rather flawed analogy.

Maybe a closer analogy would be landowners who rent out land. Should a person who bought land 10 years ago be able to generate revenue from renting it to a farmer?

Farmers pay property tax and use the land productively. Property tax is an incentive to use the land productively.

If land could be replicated with a click of a button with close to zero cost, then sure.

If you're implying that the farmer would still have an income then it's not a valid analogy. If I open sourced my software that I've been continuously developing for more than 20 years my income would drop to almost zero, immediately.

Your changes made in the last ten years would still be your exclusive monopoly so your revenue would probably not change much if you really have been continously developing it.

But even if this would destroy your business model, that doesn't mean it would not be a good idea for society as a whole. Business models become obsolete all the time. If there is enough demand for your software, you will be able to fund the development of it even without might-as-well-be-perpetual exclusive control.

Farmers will keep generate revenue with their lands 10, 20 years later. But Microsoft won't generate revenue with Office 2003.. This is whole different.

If it is imaginary land that they have thought up, yes.

Meaning you don't value the time that someone puts into building software as highly as the time a farmer puts into paying his mortgage.

Ten years is an eternity when it comes to software. But yes, software developers (and other people creating things covered under copyright) are overvalued compared to those creating physical things. And that valuation is created entirely due to IP law. How is that fair?

>And that valuation is created entirely due to IP law.

In that case, the value of land is created entirely by property law.

A farmer has the exclusive right to land from the existing fixed supply that the entire world has available to it. He didn't create it and no one else can use it. Whereas a software developer makes something new. Nobody else was deprived of anything pre-existing. Less justification for taking code from a developer than land from a farmer.

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