Comment by irjustin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by irjustin | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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.

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.

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