Comment by modriano | Hacker News Reader

Comment by modriano | Hacker News Reader

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> The entire concept of copyright is problematic - it limits what you can do with property that you own.

People can own guns. Is it problematic for the government to limit what people can do with their own guns? I would argue that it's not problematic at all, and I bet you would, too.

I'm open to other systems than copyright to make it possible for creators to afford to create and sell their creations. I think Patreon is fantastic, but I don't think it would work well for things like code (or situations where people don't really care about the creator and just want the product).

Everything will have second,third,fourth order effects.

The fundamental problem of intellectual property is that it protects the interests of large corporations far more than those of small creators. IP only matters if you have the resources to defend it in court or if your content isn't worth the effort to steal.

That sounds more like an implementation/enforcement problem than of the concept of IP.

If [

    1) disputes were decided on the merits and

    2) costs of dispute resolution were

        2.a) deferred until decision-time,

        2.b) born by the decided-against party, and

        2.c) made the decided-for party whole and then some

], I bet either

A) an industry would spring up to identify wronged creators and fund defenses of their IP, or

B) industry would just pay to license the copyrighted work.

Any system of IP will inevitably lead to some entities accumulating a disproportionate share of IP and abusing its enforcement against everyone else.

US IP law was written far before the scale of indie digital content or the mere concept of sampling was a blip in lawmakers' eyes. It was made for broadcasters and publishers to go after industrial scale bootlegging of books and movies.

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