Comment by horsawlarway | Hacker News Reader

Comment by horsawlarway | Hacker News Reader

If anything - this entire conversation just highlights (Over and Over and Over and Over again) how absolutely bonkers abusive our current copyright laws are.

The vast majority of small individuals are compelled by contract to surrender their rights to large corporations. Those large corporations then abuse the ever loving fuck out of those rights.

The express intent of copyright is now a sad joke.

Personally - I'm pretty over the entire show. This system is generating an incredible amount of inequality. New and novel content is absolutely NOT getting made, and these laws are creating vicious infights that drain resources from well intentioned companies & individuals and pass them along to complete scam corporations.

We are told stories as children that we cannot retell in our own voices decades later to our own children.

I am firmly ready to burn this copyright system to the fucking ground. It's been 300 years since the Statute of Anne - I'm ready for a different game.

Fully agree that the existing copyright and intellectual property systems are dire need of deep reform. But to get people on board, you can't just propose burning it all down, you need to point to a viable alternative. Say, limiting copyrights to something sane like 15 or 30 years. Or making it easier to invalidate obvious or trivial patents.

Or do you really want to do away with notions of intellectual property altogether? You can make an argument for that, but there would lead to deep economic changes, and you need to anticipate what the end result would look like. You still need some way to encourage the creation of new content.

Pointing out that our copyright/IP system is broken is easy. And you're right, it's totally broken! Coming up with a fix is hard work.

I don’t think we need to use the legal system to encourage creation of new content! That’s a natural thing people do. In fact there’s a lot of artistic remixing that is illegal or ambiguously legal under the current copyright regime that can be a powerful form of expression.

I really don’t think we need government policy to encourage artists to create art. (At least not of this sort - I am all for art grants.)

> But to get people on board, you can't just propose burning it all down, you need to point to a viable alternative.

This may be true for most people, I don't know. However, I personally am fully on board the "burn it all down" train and have been for a while.

Pointing out that IP is broken is _not_ easy because most people believe in the contradictory notion of intellectual property, you included, not knowing the legal history of IP, the legal and economic history of the concept of property, and so on. If it were easy, it would be obvious to everybody that 1) IP law is immoral and 2) nothing bad would happen if it's abolished outright.

Here's a free ebook on the subject, written by a patent lawyer no less: https://mises.org/library/against-intellectual-property-0

> 2) nothing bad would happen if it's abolished outright.

It is interesting that people living in the places with the weakest IP laws will pay a premium to import baby formula from the places with the strictest laws.

> Here's a free ebook on the subject

Of course it is some right-libertarian wonk piece.

This has nothing to do with IP laws, and everything to do with baby formula laws. You don't seriously think that without the ability to sell the recipe, nobody would invent a safe and effective baby formula, right?

I'm not sure you fully grasp all the dimensions of IP law.

If you have two brands of baby formula, Death brand that kills babies, and OK brand that is perfectly fine, and you start putting Death brand in fake cans labeled OK brand - that is absolutely an IP enforcement issue. The desire of OK brand to protect their brand, and profits, combined with reasonable IP laws allows them to lead enforcement actions and protect consumers.

That is absolutely not the kind of intellectual property that anyone hates.

The kind of intellectual property we are talking about is the one where Death isn't allowed to make baby formula that doesn't kill babies, because OK patented making baby formula that doesn't kill babies and won't give them a license.

> you start putting Death brand in fake cans labeled OK brand - that is absolutely an IP enforcement issue.

This is a matter of trademark, which is completely orthogonal to copyright and nobody is protesting against it here.

Every place on earth already has laws against deception and scams since thousands years ago, this has nothing to do with IP law.

I'm pretty sure a patent lawyer would know more about IP than you do, so I'm not sure who's the wonk here.

>Pointing out that our copyright/IP system is broken is easy. And you're right, it's totally broken! Coming up with a fix is hard work.

The problem I have with these arguments is they ultimately tend to boil down to the devil you know or the devil you don't know.

We keep claiming when something is broken we must provide a "fix" and the assumption is that fix has to be better than the current approach. There's pretty much no way to guarantee this because the systems in place are the only systems with evidence. So, because we have other ideas, we dare not try them because they have to "fix" the problem. The amount of inertia that keeps corruption in motion bothers me and at a fundamental level most of the inertia comes down, ironically, back to property ownership. If we abolish copyright or change it we have to make sure things are fair/equitable. Well sure, that's ideal, but what we have isn't even remotely fair and equitable anymore, so even something broken is likely an improvement.

We have no willingness as a society to try some modifications and be willing to accept failure, then shift to the next modification and iterate around until we get something sane in place. As such, the systems in place remain in place and more and more holes are found to exploit as time progress.

Our systems need to be more adaptable. Founders of the country understood that which is why they made the legal system a legal adaptable system. The question has always been though, what is the threshold? We've played it safe so long that much of the entire system designed to adapt to fix these issues has itself been targeted and gummed up intentionally to prevent that.

> You still need some way to encourage the creation of new content.

Do you? What's the argument for this? Is there some sort of extreme shortage of creative work that the state should find it necessary to encourage it? How about we end copyright, and if there's ever a problem, we offer copyrights for a short period to fluff the commons up again. A copyright anti-holiday, as it were.

Instead we do the opposite: automatically copyright everything anyone produces, and make it very difficult to surrender your copyright (unless Google or Microsoft want it, then if you object you're literally a Luddite caveman who is trying to turn back the clock on modernity because you're old, stupid, and afraid of fire.)

There is also the whole patent / copyright trolling issue too. The fact that $BIG_CORP can hire armies of lawyers to freeze competitors and beat them to market by filing frivolous lawsuits is yet another example of insanity in the whole system.

I recently watched the documentary Fire in the Blood (2013) [1] about the use, by big pharma, of patents and WIPO to obstruct access to affordable antiretrovirals (ARVs) in Africa during the worst years of the AIDS epidemic, leading to over ten million deaths. All of this when the African market for these medications represented less than 1% of the total market, in dollars. It’s absolutely infuriating!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_in_the_Blood_(2013_film)

It's a problem with legal system (not unique to any specific country, mind you, the problem is global), not patent or copyright system specifically. It grew incredible amounts of complexity so pro se became a sad joke in all but simplest cases, and there's no incentive to fix it - quite the opposite, everyone in the system is all for keeping the status quo, because it generates money.

But there are specific problems with copyright and patent law that could be improved without a global systemic overhaul that may never happen.

We have to take some small wins even in the presence of big problems.

Of course. I'm just saying that the core problem is larger than just the copyright and patent law.

Personally I don’t think patents do what people believe they do (encourage innovation). It’s a bigger discussion but briefly, the only literal function of a patent is to discourage innovation by legally barring anyone from using a patented idea as part of a new innovation. The idea we have is that the secondary effects of this will be increased profits for inventors and therefore more innovation. But actually there’s loads of secondary effects and often many of them outweigh the effect of increased profit. For every one inventor that gets a patent there might be 100 prevented from using that idea in a different and innovative way.

A classic example is 3D printers. Stratasys spent 15 years selling printers that cost tens of thousands of dollars. It wasn’t until the patent expired that people figured out how to make them for $250. Those cheaper printers are enabling mechanical engineers and designers to accelerate their process and make other new innovations faster. Stratasys had such a powerful patent they never bothered innovating down in price, instead rested on their laurels selling $25k printers to big customers.

So how many inventions were delayed or shelved because the inventors couldn’t afford a $25,000 3D printer, and $250 printers didn’t exist yet? Both Stratasys and IBM held patents related to 3D printing and they had to cross license to go in to production, so how many others would have come up with 3D printing in the 1990’s if they had not been patented? Would first mover advantage in a free market have been enough to stimulate development of 3D printers? Could we have had $2000 3D printers in the early 2000’s (Stratasys sold theirs for $30k) instead of ten years later? How many engineers would have invented new gadgets faster if they had a 3D printer ten years earlier?

Another possible example is the x86 and x86-64 ISAs locked between AMD and Intel. I don’t think Intel would have become complacent had there been more competitors…

… or the whole “oracle vs google” over the java API.

So you don't like that large corporations can abuse current copyright laws, and your solution when they find a way to launder what they don't control yet (e.g. open source code) is to burn the copyright system to the ground, such that now they can also abuse what remains?

> I am firmly ready to burn this copyright system to the fucking ground.

Same, but the issue is not copyright, which is simply an effort to wield the state to control intellectual property in the same way the state is wielded to control physical property.

The compounding problem arises when property is capital, defined as the means to convert labor into new value. Capitalism is specifically a system in which one can wield control of capital (intellectual or otherwise) to extract profit from labor then trade that profit for more capital. As a result, capital accumulates infinitely, independent of the value produced by the labor which is provided to society.

Artists require capital to convert their labor into value just as any other worker would, so where should that capital come from if not from control of the value they produce? Society must solve this problem or we will not have art to begin with. Only looking at the demand side obfuscates such issues that arise on the supply side, and the only reason we're talking about them now is that digital technology has solved the scarcity problem on the supply side. It has not solved the scarcity problem on the demand side, however.

Finally, art, just like all technological progress, is always the product of entire societies and the history of all mankind that came before it. For this reason, all copyright and patents have no rational basis and are merely bandaids for the ill side effects of controlling capital to extract profit from labor to begin with.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com