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Fine, I'll take a stab at some numbers.

Copy Right : Automatic, limit to 20 years. For more than 20 years each YEAR a tax of 2^(years of copyright, starting at 21) dollars PLUS 2^(Cyears - 20)% sales. Thus for year 21 this would be ~2million + 2% of sales. Year 25 would be ~33.5 million + 32% of sales. Year 26 would be 64% of sales, and year 27+ would be pointless.

Trade Mark : Unlimited number of years, BUT, must be filed every year. Some sort of small filing fee per mark (more costly than the government processing, this is also to protect name-space pollution) plus 1% (* edit: n%) of sales on any TMed product.

EDIT: * The additional tax per product should just be a flat n%, maybe even less than 1%. The administrative overhead of having different tax rates outweighs any benefits with my initial thoughts of a cap at 2%.

Character and Likeness things would all file under the consumer protection of Trade Mark.

Patents do not exist anymore, in the modern age no patent describes the 'useful art' in a way that is useful to anyone practicing that art in the scientific / applied engineering fields who should benefit from it, so it is unconstitutional by definition.

Discuss and adjust the copyright duration and post-free copyright numbers according to real incentive (IMO even 20 years is too long and should be ramped down to more like a decade, but the 'back end' of exponential fee increase should be stretched out to around 30 years total). Ah also, REGISTRATION of the copyright should lead to triple (actual) damages for infringement. Registration would also include filing with the National Library and an association of libraries, an archive copy of the work with is unencumbered by copyright and free of any 'DRM' or other 'protection mechanisms'; to be 'unsealed' after it becomes public domain.

I like this idea. If companies want to own the commons they should pay a tax to us as compensation. The current system is one of unlimited freeloading, we give away our commons for free and Big Mouse makes the $$$.

Yes. We’re getting royally ripped off. This is where you need to start the thought train to get people to see that fundamental change is needed. Everything else is downstream from the fact that people don't understand they’re giving away ownership of common property to others for free. It’s absurd.

I like your copyright idea in general even if I think maybe the formula could be tuned a bit. And I agree with your reasoning about patents although I don’t know enough about other industries to know if something patent-like may still be necessary (for example, as much as we hate big pharma for charging huge amounts on patented medicine, they probably do need a guaranteed payoff to incentivize the massive cost and risk of going through FDA trials).

I don’t think trademarks need to be taxed like that, basically every single consumer product has a trademark and I’m positive you could work around the nested trademark thing. I think trademarks are good to disincentivize fraud or misleading consumers (you shouldn’t be able to infringe <highly trusted brand> with low quality crap), the problem is the legal system allows frivolous application of trademark, like one company suing another for using the same common word (eg Monster) in a tangentially related domain, or another company trying to enforce trademark of something that shouldn’t even be in scope of trademark, like a color.

Especially for trademark I think we need to prevent its weaponization for anticompetitive/extractive purposes, more than we need to restrict or disincentivize its legitimate use. That probably requires some really clever lawyers with expertise moreso than HN comments

Thinking about TM more:

* Corporations / Individuals, should pay more _per mark_ when they file for more marks. Again, I don't even have a good idea of an initial proposal for the fee, just a good reason for wanting that. The more brands, characters (names attached to types of likenesses) and products locked up the less space there is for competition and innovation. Also, again, this isn't supposed to start out as a huge cost, it should be reasonable for an individual to have a trademark or two on something they're trying to create as a brand. Maybe smaller groups (including of 1 / individual) could have a lower registration fee on their first N terms. However this also needs to be balanced against effects we currently see with patent trolls. Human review (with a HIGH bar for pass!) and a requirement for a real product that consumers can purchase should be hard requirements.

* The additional tax per product should just be a flat n%, maybe even less than 1%. The administrative overhead of having different tax rates outweighs any benefits with my initial thoughts of a cap at 2%.

I just think you’re misunderstanding the problem, it’s not that trademarks are polluting the space of available terms - it’d be ridiculously punitive to tax McDonalds billions to trademark the Big Mac, Ronald McDonald and the Hamburglar - it’s that a single trademark like “Monster Energy” can be abused well outside the domain it should apply within. And also that trademarks are being granted/enforced in domains they shouldn’t, like in colors or fonts.

The way trademarks are supposed to work is that your “Monster Energy” trademark applies within the domain, so you can block “Super Monster Soda” but have no case against “Fetish Monsters Diaper Playpack”. Similarly I think it’s fair that a big concrete, skinny clown holding a hamburger at a burger shop (with a big yellow capital M sign, selling Big Macs and McFlurries) across the street from an actual McDonalds would be penalized as trademark infringement without McDonald’s having to pay billions a year in trademark costs.

What we need to disincentivize and prevent is this: https://thehustle.co/monster-energy-thinks-it-owns-the-word-...

Weirdly, this started with Monster Cable: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8848477

How about making it impossible to trademark common words (words that appear in lowercase in a dictionary)? Maybe it would incentivize companies to come up with more creative names.

You're listing all the problems (which everyone will readily agree) but what is the solution?

> Everything else needs to be thrown out and potentially replaced with something else less abusable - I think Netflix should be allowed to fund a big movie and recoup the costs fairly without it being immediately ripped and given away for free, but they shouldn’t get to bully people making similar content or even content extending the IP.

You actually state almost the exact problem that's makes IP law so impossible to do at scale. Like it's easy to distinguish between similar content, extending content vs ripping content.

Pure ripping is easy, but step outside of that, when is it "similar vs ripping". When is it right to use a DCMA takedown? Is it because a song had a similar 4 note progression? is it 5 notes? is it "tonality" of those notes", the "interval", what makes it "recognizable"?

When is a patent the same as another? When is it different? Look at fasteners. There's an insane amount of patents for fasteners. Some are truly novel for very specific purposes I say it's a special fastener for vibrations in microgravity. Space fastener! Great, that's unique! Oh and it also works well in 1G. hrm.....

Once a patent is issued, how do you know who it belongs to? The person who made it, cool that's great. But let's say he doesn't have the ability to manufacture, so he sells the patent. Now you've got your proper buyers vs trolls.

It's easy to say "let's get rid of it!" and not consider the depth of the problem at hand.

I may be misunderstanding, but I was thinking the commenter meant "ripping" as in ripping a DVD, as opposed to "ripping off of." So "immediately ripped and given away for free" meaning someone shouldn't be able to immediately distribute the recording outside of Netflix.

Agreed, and my comment to that end was:

> Pure ripping is easy

As in, that's easy to distinguish. But, take a single step away from image-for-image or byte-for-byte copy and it gets hard real fast.

That's where all the problem lies, right? That when is something not-a-direct-copy but still infringes-on-the-original?

And that's what I'm trying to highlight. My "space fastener" from earlier is unique because it does novel things (for arguments sake). But once I add "it works in 1G" well it's going up against a whole bunch of other nuts/bolts.

I'm hoping to help convince you that it's more than surface deep - is all.

I agree it’s not black and white. I think trademarks are important to protect consumers and legitimate businesses of all sizes - if Bob’s Burger’s builds up a reputation in Fooville, someone shouldn’t be able to completely copy their name+menu+corporate facade and open a shop right across the street. I also think that expensive fda trials need to be incentivized by a temporary monopoly (or some other payout) at the end, and you shouldn’t be able to inject some noise to be able to claim your rip of a just-released, expensive to produce show is something else. So the 3 forms of IP I take issue with all have legitimate applications in my eyes, and it’s ultimately going to require inherently flawed human judgment to tell when they’re infringed.

That said, I can easily point to bad outcomes that need to be handled better (mostly related to abusing litigation of IP), and I also think we can do better than the current pattern of securitizing the commons with low payment back to the commons. We’re incentivizing much more than what we’re actually attempting to incentivize with our IP system.

> I think trademarks are important to protect consumers

I agree. But did you see that the loser in the Wagatha Christie lawsuit has now trademarked the term "Wagatha Christie", even though she didn't coin the phrase?

You get a trademark to prevent "passing off" - other people making a product like yours, and using your marque to deceive consumers. When you register a trademark, you specify what classes of products you are asking protection for. Have a look at the list of goods and services Vardy claims protection for:

https://trademarks.ipo.gov.uk/ipo-tmcase/page/Results/1/UK00...

It lists hundreds of product categories that Vardy is never going to make or sell, where the risk of consumer confusion is zero.

All I know is that this system leads to many undesirable outcomes and at least in some domains I’m familiar with, like software patents, I can think of improvements (don’t grant software patents, just enforce trade secrets).

This is kind of a personal hill I’m willing to die on because I’m pissed enough already that I was born into a world that only just recently - last 200y - either enclosed (land) or ruined (air, ocean) all the other commons in a way that benefits winners (and their descendants) while harming me. But I think that, fundamentally, securitizing creative work is an enclosure of the “commons” that benefits the securitizers a bit much at the expense of the commons, indeed it’s one of the last commons we have left where there’s enough space for the Average Joe but even that is at risk given increasingly strong IP protection and multinational corporations’ patent portfolios.

For one, things like chord progressions in music are of low enough dimensionality that they can easily be fully “enclosed” to clear harm to the public, as their being previously used or invented doesn’t mean derivative-seeming works are actually stealing the IP. For patents, we’re also “enclosing” common sense applications of new technology to domains because our patent office and legal system don’t know any better, and are even setup to facilitate this (see that Texas county that handles a huge portion of patent disputes).

I don’t know all the ways to fix it, I’d rely on the expertise of lawyers and specialists (like people in the EFF) to figure that out. I’m sure people have problems with things I have domain knowledge about despite not knowing exactly how to fix it; that doesn’t mean they’re illegitimate problems. But just like when people take issue with my bigtech stuff, there are a huge number of incumbent entrenched interests incentivized to fight against detrimental (to them) changes, and most experts knowledgeable enough to understand the problem and solutions are actively employed/benefitting from the current system setup. It’s just a hard problem.

I disapprove of the term "IP". In the cases of both copyright and patent, there is no property; there is just a limited right to exploit a work or invention for a finite amount of time. That's not "property".

Patents is a mess. You invent cool thing X, and patent it; you get 15 years or so of protection. After 14 years, you tweak invention X to make thing Y, and patent that.

Wait - that means you've got another 15 years added to the patent term of X! How does that work? You should only have protection for the Y tweak.

Copyright was supposed to protect "works", not fragments of melody. The Led Zeppelin/Spirit argument about Taurus/Stairway To Heaven is interesting; I'm a big Spirit fan, and the Stairway intro sure sounds a lot like Taurus to me. I believe it was a lift. But there's a lot more to Stairway than the intro; Taurus was on Spirit's rather obscure first album, and it wasn't a big hit. It wasn't hit material. The claim was obviously a money-grab by the heirs of Randy California's estate against one of the biggest rock hits of the 70s. Copyright shouldn't be inheritable; it should expire on the author's death.

This gets really murky when people start trading in copyrights and patents. I don't know why that's permitted; the rights should adhere strictly to the author/inventor. There should be no corporate copyright. I think the theory is that the author/inventor is often unable for financial reasons to defend their rights; but I don't see why that should be. If a claim has merit, it should be possible to find a practitioner who's willing to help you, in exchange for a share of the damages.

As a musician, to me the fact that Stairway's high note goes up while the low note goes down, is so substantial a change that it's not even slightly Taurus anymore, even looking just at the intro.

> Copyright shouldn't be inheritable; it should expire on the author's death.

That'd create some strange incentives though – if it looks like the author might be dying (relatively) soon, people might opt to wait for a possibly premature expiration (both the author's and his/her copyrights) instead of paying to get access right now. In a particularly dystopic future, it might even create incentives to speed up an unfortunate author's demise just to get at the copyrights.

if you propose any reforms to the intellectual property schemes at all, musicians will be the first to be protesting that.

the system allows all kinds of abuse, but it also greatly benefits anybody who makes their living through intellectual property, at the expense of all the rest of us. this specific time it hurts Ed Sheeran, but it's also made him a lot of money. and we all care about it this time because it affects somebody famous enough for us to care, but all those "chilling effects" already exist and art and creativity is stifled every day to protect the rich and famous (and their heirs)

1-Click may seem obvious. But then why did no one come up with it before? You can say the same for a paperclip and I'm sure there are countless more. I'm open to patents that seem obvious. Sometimes novel and obvious ideas are there but it takes a special spark to get them defined and known. I will take 100 useless and obvious ideas, if it means we get 1 useful never seen one that helps us. By the way, "obvious" is only seen after it is presented. Think about it in these terms. There are math problems that seem impossible to solve yet once the answer is presented one wonders why they did not come up with the answer since the answer seems so obvious.

Patents and copyrights are so important that they are part of the US Constitution. I'm one that believes that they are a must for a working economy that produces products that we need. There are countless of products that would not exist if we did not have them. Many of the pharmaceuticals that require billions of dollars would not be available without IP protection. I would even question the whole music business and its many unique songs that are only produce with the hope that they become hits and the money that comes with it that lets artists support themselves.

The problem is not Copyrights and Patents but the way businesses have captured the implementation of the laws around them. That's where the reform should happen. A company should not have the power to rewrite IP laws to favor themselves.

> 1-Click may seem obvious. But then why did no one come up with it before?

There probably weren't that many other e-commerce outfits at the time with a customer base made up of frequent/repeat buyers (to a degree that would motivate the designers to opt for it). The first store to put a big red sign with its name above its entrance shouldn't necessarily be granted the exclusive privilege of doing so for the next N years.

Because we all thought it was stupid (keeping track of credit cards and other issues). There wasn't anything novel about one click. My personal opinion is, copyright needs to be shortened. Patents harder to get. Trademarks are mostly fine.

My favorite, somewhat memey but factually correct example is that we put men on the moon before we put wheels on luggage.

The modern, two wheeled with handle "tipper" style didn't come onto the market until 1987.

1-click was patented in the days of forms, session tokens, ajax, etc. being relatively new. So yes someone was going to be first.

Someone was absolutely going to figure out the implementation of 1-click ordering regardless of who patented it. That’s why software patents suck, they almost always take the form of “apply technology X to domain Y in a really basic way” which would be invented hundreds of times independently even with no prior art - but whoever gets that patent gets to block or tax all those other independent inventions of the same pattern for years. I can’t speak as much to other industries but I’m confident it describes many many patents outside software. It’s not obvious in hindsight dude, it’s obvious that given a website where I’m buying things, a good UX for some cases is to just let me buy the thing in one click.

Hey I have a bunch of ideas for LLMs, should I get a patent for “a system for using a transformer model to find a message in a system’s logs” or “use a transformer model to identify a problem in an application” or “use a transformer model to produce output in the style of some human generated input”? Those are obvious given the invention of transformers, but software patents often take that exact structure “payment over a network” “use of a biometric signal to authenticate a banking transaction”.

I’m pretty sure you don’t even need to implement what you’re patenting to get the patent, just describe it well enough and hope nobody else implemented it or filed for it first. Which just incentivizes purely unproductive behavior of patenting “ideas” you expect will be independently arrived at many times in the near future so you can tax them. Or makes a market for so-called “inventors” to engage in this inefficient behavior so they can sell their “inventions” (accepted patents) to trolls or megacorps to do that (yes, this is what the people who file patents to tax others for a living call themselves).

What makes you think some other new system will be less abusable? Any new system will be dropped in among a lot of people who made their livings from abuse and will be very eager to keep doing so.

The whole "X is bad, so let's reinvent it from scratch" doesn't have a great track record. An obvious example is the way the cryptocurrency space has spent the last 15-years speed-running the discovery of why a financial regulatory system is in fact valuable. And as Mike Masnick pointed out, we see it over and over in the social media space. [1] Or we might look at the Russian and Chinese revolutions.

Obviously, we should look at the way the current IP system is being misused or is suboptimal and improve it. But trying to rebuild it from scratch could end up worse even if every current bad actor wouldn't be vigorously lobbying to make abuse easier in the new version. And they certainly would.

[1] https://www.techdirt.com/2022/11/02/hey-elon-let-me-help-you...

I don’t see a way to iterate out of the current IP system because it benefits incumbents too much. It’s like with switching from property taxes to (Georgist) land value taxes or even ending NIMBY-ism, the people it benefits are the ones with the least power, and more importantly the exact people it’s stifling don’t even know it’s stifling them (who knows which entrepreneurs will benefit from relaxing the rules, and how exactly that will benefit consumers?). Especially in our current political system where money = the size of your political voice, there’s a lot of power that would oppose it. Securitizing part of the commons creates clear winners who’ll defend their assets, but returning those assets to the commons basically destroys an asset in a way with harder to understand benefits.

Also, the current IP system is in a way a form of protectionism that benefits mostly Western companies (at the expense of mostly western consumers). Piecemeal iteration towards allowing more profits to be captured by developing countries vs American companies… you’d need to make a bigger change that clearly benefits western consumers more than it harms them.

I’m not saying we need a communist revolution lol, but I do think we need to start by reasoning from the fundamental outcomes we want to incentivize and consider how a replacement system incentivizes those vs undesirable outcomes. For example, I think approximately no author (yes I know this applies to a couple of Tolkien’s pieces) is factoring in whether their IP lasts 25 years vs 75 years into their decision to write something. And I think it’s safe to say that patents, in at least most domains I’m familiar with, do much more to stifle actual entrepreneurship than to incentivize it.

Sorry, but I don't see an answer to my question, so I'll ask it again: What makes you think some other new system will be less abusable?

For starters we can learn from the failings of our current system - it does some things well, but clearly it incentivizes things we should not be incentivizing, and I argue it disincentivizes some of what it think it’s incentivizing (entrepreneurship). Second-mover advantage and all that.

Another potential reason a replacement would be less abusable is that, if the replacement does away with IP middlemen (patent trolls, record labels making huge profits off what are effectively payday loans to artists, conglomerates like Disney acquiring as much IP in some domains as they can) we could avoid the situation where extractive elements lobby for increasingly more extractive laws or policies or throw their weight around in a way to create unfair outcomes.

I’d like to add our current system is something we’ve progressively iterated towards through centuries of common law (originating from before the Industrial Revolution and even such radical concepts as “widespread literacy” or “less than 90% of people being farmers”). It has accumulated cruft and crap and comes from a time where creative work was proportionately a less important part of the economy, and is a product of centuries of influence from incumbents seeking regulatory capture. Just weakening those incumbents and giving them less of a snowball to roll down the hill would lessen abuse for the time being.

Sorry, but as I said, those people will still exist on day 1 of the new regime. And they'll be lobbying hard between now and day 1. It's at least as plausible to me that starting fresh will be more abuseable, because you're going from a situation with lots of data on abuse modes to one with no data. It's a bet that you (or somebody) is going to be smarter than the real world, which is a bet that rarely works out.

It would be if we make it explicit that there is no right to profit from creativity - the sole purpose of the system should be to maximize the total creative output for the benefit of the commons.

> the way the cryptocurrency space has spent the last 15-years speed-running the discovery of why a financial regulatory system is in fact valuable

I feel like this was clear to most people, which is why Crypto never really took off other than as an investment vehicle.

How much do you think the lawyers care what HN'ers think? Read this for some honest takes. They don't even care.

https://www.reddit.com/r/patentlaw/comments/12x4361/alice_fa...

Well, that article also wasn't very good. The condescending attitude towards anyone who isn't an engineer is palatable, even to an engineer like me. The discussion on Reddit is mostly constructive in spite of this.

The suggestion that HN is somehow representative of "engineers" in general is just not true. While HN includes many people with all sorts of opinions, the average is quite biased, especially on topics like this.

Still plenty of time for you to weigh in there.

The lawyers came out of that one looking pretty good, to be honest...

What a bunch of condescending assholes in that thread! They don’t respect us at all. Fortunately the engineers control the RLHF of their replacement :)

r/patentlaw is closer to /r/CScareerquestions than anything else

I think it's true that patent lawyers don't give a shit what HNers think, but I don't think that stuff posted to reddit is a good benchmark either

We spent the Trump years strongarming the rest of the world into uniform copyright laws. What happens now? “JK guys actually you can forget about what we said”. It seems that the only real option is to maintain copyright laws for all other countries while shortening your own. It seems like a huge competitive disadvantage for a country to be the first to do that.

Trump wasn't particularly special for this. In fact, by tanking TPP, he actually stopped at least one massive tool for curtailing IP sovereignty.

Not making a flattering statement about Trump here, just that _he_ wasn't _the problem_, in this and other things.

That said, "jk guys actually you can forget about what we said" would be fantastic for this and many other things our government has made part of its international doctrine, and might be a thing it would even do if our government had any interest in governing for our benefit rather than for a tiny minority.