Comment by pikminguy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pikminguy | Hacker News Reader

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You're mixing up patents, copyright, and plagiarism. Similar but not the same ideas.

Copyright exists to protect a creator's right to the proceeds of their creative output. Copyright is pretty broad. If I tell a different story with your characters I'm still violating copyright.

Patents exist to protect an inventor's right to the proceeds of their invention. If you invent a true hoverboard and I buy one, reverse engineer it, and sell copies I'm in trouble. But if I am merely inspired by your creation to go invent my own hover tech that works differently I can sell that just fine.

Descriptions of the real world as it already exits do not get copyright or patent regardless of the work put in. No matter how good a job you do creating a map of New York you can't prevent someone else from making a map of New York.

You are totally missing the point - the point made in the previous post was, that intellectual labour should be rewarded with some sort of IP, so that the creator of it is rewarded. The categorisation of different types of IP is not fundamental.

The counterpoint I made is that we do not reward some types of intellectual labour at all. And some of the greatest contributions to humanity are of the type, that is not rewarded. So the argument as initially presented is flawed:

Either the authors of intellectual labour do not need to be rewarded with ownership, perhaps other types of compensation is more appropriate

OR

Authors of scientific intellectual labour are currently unfairly exploited and should be compensated

>>Authors of scientific intellectual labour are currently unfairly exploited and should be compensated

Yup, that is very true.

And it's why a number of universities are creating patent offices to help their scientists commercialize their works (with the university getting a share; I'm not up to date on how fair the sharing is)

I understood your previous post to be arguing against copyright on the basis of scientific work not counting. If you meant copyright is fine but the way we compensate scientific work is bad then I agree. It's a complex issue because I don't think you should be able to copyright a factual claim but I do think scientific work should be better compensated. I don't know of a solution to that problem but I would be eager to hear one.

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