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Comment by chii | Hacker News Reader

> forcibly strip mining the ideas of independent creators.

this is the same argument that patent proponents had, because patents protects the little guy.

And yet, most copyright enforcement occurs via large corporations who have an interest in doing so to further some other goal as part of a strategy to gain monopoly. Patents as well as copyright is but a tool, and any tool can be more powerfully wielded if the wielder is more powerful!

The little guy is better off without copyright imho (but that horse has already bolted).

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Patents protect the little guy from the manufacturers. A patent is supposed to secure the effort of R&D without necessarily having the budget for massive manufacturing. It prevents the manufacturer from taking off with your idea and giving you nothing for it. It seperates the manufacturing cost and r&d cost. In software, there is 0 manufacturing, it is entirely R&D. As soon as you have developed your product, its ready. Hence why patents feel so useless in software. Also why software startups are so attractive to investors.

> Patents protect the little guy from the manufacturers.

As long as the little guy's patent can improve the process without stepping on any of the countless pre-existing patents manufacturers have accumulated. Now how often is that the case?

> Patents protect the little guy from the manufacturers

Except in the cases where manufacturers just stall the little guy in court for most of their life.

Until very recently the little guy could effectively use a poisonous license like GPL to dissuade exactly this sort of thing.

The system of copyright worked very well to protect smaller entities in this regard.

How well has copyright really worked for the little guy? Even when there are wins in the GPL violation suits, the payout barely covers the cost of litigation (i'm imputing the cost even if it is pro bono).

Not to mention tivoization which trivially bypasses GPLv2.

except it didn't in practice because the little guy has no ability to enforce even these poisonous licences.

in reality your licence is only as strong as your ability to enforce it.

By the way, it is much easier to enforce a patent as a "little guy" than a copyright. Because patents entitle you to huge damages and are harder to evade, many layers will take complex patent cases on contingency (as long as you have a solid read on the claims) and there is a lot of financing available otherwise. On copyright enforcement, you're pretty much stuck.

any mechanism will be used by someone to protect and entrench themselves. Small or large.

The more difficult and expensive it is to use, the more it will be the domain of those with more resources, and the more the small will be defenseless.

The answer is not to eliminate copyright or patents, but rather to make them simple and easy to apply for, defend, and find. The current bar is so high it favors the big guys only, and gives them leverage against smaller folks who can’t afford to even show up to defend themselves usually.

Or eliminate it entirely, but you’ll not be able to do that because Disney, Microsoft, Oracle, and the like would murder/compromise/destroy anyone who might be able to do that.

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