Likewise the Chinese often ignore foreign copyrights and patents, though not as much as the US did back then.
If I built a binary Linux distro, you know damn well ZFS will be in the kernel, it will be hosted on only .onion and .i2p, and all Linux Foundation and Oracle Corp C&D emails will be published with sensibly witty lampooning comments.
The talking point is always focused on rewarding those who did the work but that I have to pay to enforce the scheme and the cost of going without if we don't get permission is also not important at all.
Funny as hell to pay so that it can be assured I don't get to use something.
I think we should find ways to at least judge some technology valuable enough to buy it into the public domain at sensible but non-negotiable rates.
Even this feeble pitch would hold a lot more weight if companies either couldn't own copyright or couldn't purchase the copyright. As it is it's more like a corrupt rent-extraction scheme with government backing.
If you’re ignoring copyright and IP rights while catching up? That’s just freeloading, you need someone to pay for all the research/innovation.
> if I have to navigate patents
Albeit still more likely than if you have no funding? Investors don’t have as many incentives to provide that if they can’t get a return.
Of course you need a balance, over restrictive IP protection might be as bad as not having it at all.
This is not true. Everyone, everywhere, who created any thing ever, built it on the backs of [millennia of] previous creators.
History teaches us that innovation flows in the absence of restrictions - including rent-seeking. Conversely, modern history teaches us that IP gets in the way everywhere it can.
It’s rather [extremely] simple and obvious , generally R&D requires significant investment. If you can’t get any return on your investment, you won’t invest.
Of course there needs to be a balance to minimize rent seeking beyond a certain point.
The first publisher to get a hold of one would have a massive advantage.
Publisher pays Charles Dickens to only provide his newest work to them. Many publishers want this privilege, there is a bidding war.
Publisher sells millions in the first week, eventually other publishers get in on the action but it takes time to typeset, print and ship the books. The book is the talk of the town, consumers want one now.
Publishing house doesn't make outsized profits years after the authors death and instead has to compete on the quailty of its publishing in the free market.
Rent seeker has to get a factory job or dies. The market is brimming with high quailty editions of each authors work available to everyone at a price point they can afford.
That’s not how it worked back in the 1800s, that’s not even how it works now.
In any case Charles Dickens would have earned less than he did and a larger proportion of surplus would have went to printers and publishers. How is that in any way a positive thing?
And of course without physical distribution your “business” model is even more absurd (being very absurd to begin with).
I’m not sure if you are aware (presumably not) but that’s how publishing worked in the 1500s. Cervantes got a lump sum for the Don Quixote (and his other books) and he was never able to sustain himself by writing and a had to have a daytime job.
His books were (relatively) extremely popular at the time and no publishers outside of Spain paid him anything. It seems rather absurd that even someone like him could never make a comfortable living by writing?
> Rent seeker has to get a factory job or dies
These bizarrely unhinged anti IP takes are truly something else..
I mean sure the “fair” duration of copyright is up for discussion, author’s life + 70 years is probably excessive.
Why does that level of effort entitle someone to a "comfortable living"? That's on the order of a few words a day.
Shakespeare wrote 39 plays and 154 sonnets. He didn't need a day job beacuse he wrote full time. He didn't enjoy copyright protection and was fine.
Because people enjoyed his books and were willing to pay for them? (But all the profits when to the printers in Belgium etc)
> That's on the order of a few words a day.
That irrelevant. It’s about the value/utility you provide and not the amount of labor.
Also you(or me) really have no clue how many words he wrote per day even if that were relevant. Maybe he wrote a dozen drafts for each book which he discarded, how would that change anything?
I mean… if you wrote down 500 words per day would you believe that you deserve to be paid more for that than Cervantes for e.g. 0.01 of his words?
> Shakespeare
Ran a theater (together with his partners) i.e. he was both the writer and the publisher.
His final theater troupe was sponsored directly by the King (previous one by the Lord Chamberlain) and had a royal patent and operated in a heavily regulated market. So surely not a very good example?
Or is patronage and a system heavily regulated by the government preferable to legal copyright? Because that the only realistic alternative besides having no content.
> entitle
What entitles you to the content of your bank account or retirement savings? Maybe even your house? What kind of a question was that even? (I don’t really get it)
People paid for something that took forever to materialize but were somehow excited to be part of the process.
Innovation right there!
“No Copyright Law: The Real Reason for Germany's Industrial Expansion?”, https://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/no-copyright-...
Look at SpaceX. What they had perfected isn't going to be easily available in patents, homeworks for other people to copy, especially the Chinese. What they are willing to do is what other companies and organizations aren't willing to do. When SpaceX steadily made progress, people kept dismissing them until it's too late and now SpaceX is pushing ahead anyway.
It's a form of false strength, and there had been discussion about how detrimental patent laws are to innovations.
He apparently wished to both protect his process and keep it secret.
In every political system, the existing rules are created to preserve the existing status quo. Where do those rules come from? There is chaos and war (not necessarily kinetic; there are trade wars too), the war ends with a political settlement which satisfies enough participants to create stability (as all wars must end; otherwise people keep fighting), and the signatories to peace create rules to maintain their desired outcome.
Later a power arises for whom that peace isn't desireable. They are the revisionist power and want a change. Intellectual property rights are desireable for those who have a lot of intellectual property, the status quo IP powers. New powers might not have IP and don't find IP rights to be desireable.
If the revisionist power is strong enough, then either the status quo powers accomodate them - perhaps a controlled IP transfer program for developing countries, in return for strong IP laws or openness to foreign investment within those countries - or there's war (again, not necessarily kinetic war - maybe lots of hacking and IP theft, for example).
[0] "International relations analysts often differentiate between status-quo and revisionist states. Revisionist states favor modifications to the prevailing order: its rules and norms, its distribution of goods or benefits, its implicit structure or hierarchy, its social rankings that afford status or recognition, its division of territory among sovereign entities, and more."
https://oxfordre.com/internationalstudies/display/10.1093/ac...
And up is up unless it is down :-)
It's not that 'wars must end, otherwise they keep fighting', but that there is 'a political settlement which satisfies enough participants to create stability ... otherwise they keep fighting'. [0]
I will stipulate that the sentence could have parsed more clearly. :-(
[0] It's just Clausewitz, effectively: Warfare is politics conducted by other means.
Drink!
Apologies to fans of Bret Deveraux :-)
Some wars end!
In 2000, Bo McCoy and Ron McCoy organized a joint family reunion of the Hatfield and McCoy that garnered national attention. More than 5,000 people attended.
The free software movement has shown that freely distributing IP is quite workable.
It’s very successful in areas where software is a “cost center” (i.e. allows companies to use it reduce the cost of developing (semi)proprietary software)and not the end product. Everywhere else it’s mixed or a failure (e.g. video games).
Edit: the Romans first “stole” silk in the 500s, but still
Owning a home might seem more "real" than owning some IP, but it is just an agreement, and without a proper enforcement, anybody could enter and live in your house (which is what actually happens with squatters in some European countries where you're not allowed to kick them out by yourself and police don't care).
So property rights were never "real" (inherently) — they only become real when somebody kicks your ass for violating them. That's the only real thing about it.
I know everyone gets a stupid stick up their ass over property ownership and "rent seeking" but property ownership is just ownership of "something". You can rent seek any investment. The whole point of much every professional license is that we all agree to let these people "rent seek" because they've proved they don't suck at the subject.
Property ownership restricts what you can do on my property.
IP restricts what you can do on anyone's property, including your own.
Edison basically pirated "A Trip to the Moon" and showed it in the US: