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Comment by NuSkooler | Hacker News Reader

I've been trying to convince people of this for years. The problem is from my view, that people have the idea of IP being some sort of the American Dream ingrained in their heads that they can't even reason about anything else.

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The problem is from my view, that people have the idea of IP being some sort of the American Dream ingrained in their heads that they can't even reason about anything else.

Maybe it depends on which people you ask, but I don't think the American Dream is about IP at all --- but mostly freedom and independence.

Deeply entrenched in that freedom is the fantasy of inventing some new miracle product, or supremely popular song or book. It’s protecting the idea that someday I might be the wealthy benefactor of these practices and rules. We see people vote against their interests all the time because of “The American Dream”, and the hope that they might achieve it.

At the heart of the American Dream (and indeed of most Western culture) is the meritocracy - or more specifically the lie of it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_meritocracy

Freedom and independence are propaganda in the same way that high school football coaches tell their players they can get into the NFL if they work hard enough

Right, freedom and independence for the property owners. Whether that property is land, people, or "intellectual" is just as irrelevant to the Dreamer as if that property was obtained by deception or violence.

perhaps my formulation in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40911782 will be helpful to you. or in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40911903

What's a suitable replacement?

Copyright should probably grant some benefit to an author, but just the bare minimum necessary to incentivize people to actually submit their work and file for copyright (also, we should resume requiring that you actually file for copyright, as was the case before 1978). This probably means some period of exclusive monetization rights. Anyone should be able to search for and read any filed works for free from the moment they are filed, or possibly after this exclusive monopoly period.

Any additional benefits to copyright holders beyond what is needed to make sure we don't lose the works are essentially graft, no different in principle to the medieval church selling lucrative offices.

If these things are valuable only because of scarcity, then we are incentivizing scarcity by granting monopoly, so we should do as little of that as we can manage. If they are inherently valuable, they should be as widely disseminated as possible (a cost that government can easily afford given modern technology). If they are worthless, there is no harm in the government keeping a copy anyway.

"but just the bare minimum necessary to incentivize people to actually submit their work and file for copyright"

Oh, okay!

A copyright term of 30 years after first publication, or 30 years after creation if no publication happens in this period. Ideally add some provision that ensures works are actually available after that period (similar to how many countries require all printed books to be submitted to the national library, but extend it to all media that achieves some benchmark of significance). Patent duration adjusted on a per-industry basis. Trademarks are fine as is

The best model I've seen for patents is increasingly escalating renewal fees for periodic terms. Such as get the first 5 years for very limited fees, every 5 years (up to some max such as 30) require 2-5x to renew or the patent expires. The exponentially increasing fees limit the hoarding of patents without direct economic benefits, but the high cost means you are able to provide offsetting social benefits while still providing incentives for innovation.

> The best model I've seen for patents is increasingly escalating renewal fees for periodic terms. Such as get the first 5 years for very limited fees, every 5 years (up to some max such as 30) require 2-5x to renew or the patent expires. The exponentially increasing fees limit the hoarding of patents without direct economic benefits, but the high cost means you are able to provide offsetting social benefits while still providing incentives for innovation.

So, basically, long-term patents should be a privilege reserved for the rich (people and corporations). Everyone else should GTFO? I'm sure FAANG would still be totally able to massively horde patents with whatever fee structure you propose.

FFS, Amazon developed literally dozens of commercial properties in my area, and then let them sit vacant for literal years because they had some change in strategy. They're perfectly happy to burn money, since they have so much.

So, your idea doesn't solve the problem you're trying to solve, and it would make things worse besides.

If the scale is exponential, it becomes billions of dollars to keep a patent after a couple decades. Then trillions, at some point after which they’ve decided to give up the patent. Many companies are rich, but they aren’t infinitely rich.

Patents already have a limited term, why would we want this in a policy?

The term is too long. This changes it from a fixed term, to a use-it-or-lose-it oriented policy.

Patent term is 20 years from the date of filing, and doesn't begin to run until the patent issues, which is usually years after it was filed. It's incomprehensible to me how you can seriously argue that the US patent term is too long but then should be replaced with a system that allows for an indefinite term.

Do you know what a trade secret is? Trade secret already has an indefinite term. There's no reason why patent terms should be indefinite, it's antagonistic the concept of disclosure that is required to obtain a patent in the first place.

> Patent term is 20 years from the date of filing, and doesn't begin to run until the patent issues, which is usually years after it was filed. It's incomprehensible to me how you can seriously argue that the US patent term is too long

20 years is too long for many things where after that time the technology is no longer relevant. Remember that the entire point of intellectual property is to encourage creation in order to enrich the commons.

> but then should be replaced with a system that allows for an indefinite term.

And exponentially increasing fee does not allow an indefinite term because noone has infinite money. At some point the fee will be more than the entire global wealth.

>And exponentially increasing fee does not allow an indefinite term because noone has infinite money. At some point the fee will be more than the entire global wealth.

Don't be obtuse. If 20 is too long, telling me that it can't actually be indefinite* isn't a great argument. So it can be 40 years if they pay? How is that better?!?

Literally exponentially increasing means that if the fee is $2 in year one, it's just over a trillion bucks in year 40. Even with inflation, if a patent is important enough to someone to finance the entire welfare state, I say let them have it, and I'm an IP abolitionist too.

Current term is something like 70 years after the death of the author.

It's simply too long for a world that moves this fast.

You are thinking about copyright, which the fact that you can't discern between the two should probably be a sign to bow out of dictating IP policy.

Another model I've seen for copyright is that you declare a "buyout price" for the copyright, the price at which you will release the work into the public domain. You pay 1% of that price every year as a renewal fee, with a 10 year limit.

Don't know if it would work but it's interesting.

Removing it without replacement would be a net benefit at this point.

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