Comment by martin-t | Hacker News Reader

Comment by martin-t | Hacker News Reader

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It's not a binary too string / too weak. It's that _copyright_:

- protects the wrong entities (corporations instead of individuals who did the real work) - IP should be collectively owned by the people who created it and selling it should be illegal,

- is too long, yes

- DMCA can be used to harass without actually owning the IP and there are no penalties

- the fair use exception can be used to allow clear cases of plagiarism where you mechanically transform an original work with barely any human input in such a way that it's hard or impossible to prove it was based on the original.

As for _patents_, they should simply require proof of work - basically they should only be for recovering research costs (with profit), not holding everyone hostage. They should also be subject to experts in the field verifying they are not trivial and how much work they would take to replicate.

And obviously China is a global parasite. We should apply to them the same standards they apply to us - none.

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More generally incentives matter. If trying something has (near) 0 cost but high reward, abusive actors will keep trying despite most of their attempts failing. Anybody who understands that incentives shape the world will immediately identify this pattern (any gamedevs here?). There must be punishments for provably bogus attempts to use IP - both copyright and patents.

> - protects the wrong entities (corporations instead of individuals who did the real work) - IP should be collectively owned by the people who created it and selling it should be illegal,

That's like say a band getting an advance to record their album should be illegal. Without access to people with money now a lot of it wouldn't get made. And if they are fronting the money before it exists, then they are taking risk so they need a risk premium.

The other results is art made by those who don't need it, purely made by amateurs, grant funded art, or socially funded art.

All are workable, but with their own tradeoffs.

>That's like say a band getting an advance to record their album should be illegal.

It should.

>Without access to people with money now a lot of it wouldn't get made.

So be it.

>The other results is art made by those who don't need it, purely made by amateurs, grant funded art, or socially funded art.

Sounds amazing.

We don't need to go with the default vanilla options that are passed as inevitable...

>> That's like say a band getting an advance to record their album should be illegal.

> It should.

Mortgages and car loans can be seen as advances on future income.

Insurance is a way to split a risk from a property. For example, if I own a house there’s a risk it burns down. With fire insurance, you keep the house, but the insurer takes on the risk, in exchange for a fee.

Why shouldn’t a band be permitted to do something similar, getting money now in exchange for future income and, at the same time, transferring the risk of their future product being a flop to a third party?

>Mortgages and car loans can be seen as advances on future income

I'm against those as well. Buy stuff after you can afford it.

>Insurance is a way to split a risk from a property. For example, if I own a house there’s a risk it burns down. With fire insurance, you keep the house, but the insurer takes on the risk, in exchange for a fee.

I'm against insurance companies too. Have a public insurance fund instead.

You could have a system that limits sale of IP to clearly defined capitalization, I.E. instead of "You own this IP for 20 years and get x% of profits in return for funding/publishing and giving my y% of profits" it could be "In return for funding/publishing in the next 5 years, you get x% of profits and I get y% of profits, but I still own my IP and your rights expire after a short period of not publishing.

AFAIK that's actually standard for writers: publishers usually license the IP for a period for a prescribed royalty blend and for publishing, and after a certain amount of time or if they don't publish the rights revert, and international/audio/digital rights are negotiated separately.

There's an argument for "What if I don't want to deal with capitalizing on this whatsoever and just want to sell it for a cash payment now because I literally don't want that to be my job," but even then there should probably be a minimum royalty along with the lump sum to protect against exploitation.

The other replies are good.

The general principle is inverting who has power. It should always be with people doing real positive-sum work, not those with money whose primary business of redistributing money and taking a cut.

If they are allowed to ask for something, they will and because they have more power, they are able to pressure people into unfavorable deals. They don't need your band, there's plenty of others who will take the deal. But you need their money or someone else's but that somebody else will offer similar terms, unless those exploitative terms are illegal because people united against parasitism.

> It should always be with people doing real positive-sum work, not those with money

I don't like the conclusion, but I've convinced myself that curating and selecting what is worth doing is actually the real work. Picking where the bridge is to go is more important than building it. So allocating money is the important work. It feels icky to me... but also inescapable.

How would people with money and no artistic talent know? If we're not talking about art but some other kind of productive work - again - money does not qualify them. It gives them the power to decide, it probably lets them cultivate a skill for knowing which investments are gonna make money and which are gonna lose it. But it does not qualify them to decide what is beneficial for others.

As for the analogy - who picks where it gets built? It better be an engineer. And just look at the mounf of work done by the engineer, the builders and some suit who rubber stamps it. Work and skill is what should be rewarded, not having money.

>And obviously China is a global parasite.

Britain said the same things about the US in the early days. We told them to f* off about copyright/patent stuff quite often.

Britain was also putting into place laws/regulations/policies requiring that the U.S. purchase from British manufacturers rather than developing native production --- there's a reason why the first printing press in North America was in Mexico.

Which is pretty much what patent law ends up being right? The patent holder telling the licensee the conditions.

Copyright/patents/laws are just tools. They can be used for both good and evil.

The early US had pro-social goals such as democracy or freedom. And yes, they used slaves because there are no good guys in history or politics, there's various shades of bad.

Current China has anti-social goals such as total control of the population through technological means and expansion by conquest - see them harassing the legitimate government of all of Chine in Taiwan constantly with the military or trying to sink Philipino fishing boats with their warships (two crashed into each other recently). It is also currently committing genocide through both murder and sterilization.

So yeah, I am totally for considering them a parasite and treating them as such.

I'm really fascinated about heavy downvotes for your post because it makes a lot of sense.

I wonder who the people who show up to defend IP law are in these conversations. Why do it? What's the gain?

Who knows? Votes should be public, otherwise this is an easy way to make opinions less visible without having to provide any justification.

Sometimes very similar comments in favor of protecting producers get upvotes on one post and downvotes on another. I also started seeing a pattern - even if a particular comment ends up downvoted in the end, there's usually a few upvotes first, sometimes with comments, then downvotes quickly to get it negative and there's never any comments justifying it and few if any comments after it gets negative. This indicates downvoting works well to silence the discussion.

When you think about it, it really doesn't make much difference if it's a downvote-a-bot or not.

If it acts like a bot, walks like a bot, and quacks like a bot, it might as well be a bot.

Nobody's comments are read only by humans any more.

"protects the wrong entities (corporations instead of individuals who did the real work)"

> laughs in Capitalism

Oh, yeah, 5 upvotes and 2 comments, then suddenly 7 downvotes without any replies. Totally organic.

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