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Comment by shadowmint | Hacker News Reader

Remember theres a difference between getting rid of patents and getting rid of intellectual property.

I don't think anyone is serious about suggesting we get rid of intellectual property; if you're create something, there should be protections to stop people ripping off your stuff and selling it without paying you for it.

It's patents that are the problem.

Patents let you capture an idea and prevent people from creating new things.

That's not protecting something you've created; it's stifling the creative will of others, because you don't want anyone to compete with you. It's the legislative antithesis of the open market.

Notch wrote about this before too, thoughtfully: http://notch.tumblr.com/post/27751395263/on-patents

The US could happily continue to have an major IP 'exports' (however that is appropriately referred to) without patents.

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It's merely conventional that humans can claim the property of ideas. Nobody can "steal" an idea, so there's no way of ripping off the creator.

The notion of intellectual property is now widespread because is the source of profit for companies, but it's not "natural" as the property of material stuff.

Apart from that, if you think that the current laws protect the creators from third parties profiting with their ideas, how do you think Microsoft got big?

I disagree that there should be protections to stop people from "ripping off your stuff" and selling it without paying you for it. Instead, there should be protections to stop people from copying your idea without you getting credit for it. But there don't need to be legal protections. All you need to do is make your idea public to prevent anyone else from claiming they were first.

I'm serious about getting rid of all patents and all copyrights.

I don't understand.

Say I pay a Valve employee a million dollars for the current working source-code of Half-Life 3. I then compile it and release the first couple working levels for $10 a pop... I should easily be able to make 50 million out of that exercise.

What protections would Valve have in your no-copyright, no-ip scenario?

Criminal law, it wasn't his to sell, you both broke the law.

Nothing was "stolen".

Without copyright there was nothing that was removed from Valve. It is just a copy.

False, a trade secret was stolen, and said employee did not have the right to copy it or disclose it.

Wait a sec... so get rid of patents, copyrights but leave the concept of trade secrets? How does that make sense?

You can't outlaw companies keeping confidential information. And you certainly can't legalize its theft and maintain a functioning market.

I'm not anti-trade secrets. In your scenario, the source code to Half-Life 3 is a trade secret that the Valve employee is obligated to keep. However, if the code is ever made publicly available to read, it's no longer a secret and no money should be made from selling or licensing it. And even if the source is never public, once binaries are made public, it should be perfectly legal to reverse engineer those binaries.

In a no-copyright world, Valve's business model would certainly have to change, but your particular example would work mostly the same as it does now. The major difference is that you wouldn't be able to make 50 million dollars. Once those levels were released, people would be able to share them freely among themselves. Only the first person has to pay the $10, which means if you're willing to pay a million dollars for illegal access to secret source code, you should probably have a better plan for what to do with it. =P

> Once those levels were released, people would be able to share them freely among themselves

> In a no-copyright world, Valve's business model would certainly have to change

Yes it would have to change. Honestly I don't think you've thought this all the way through.

You need to show how companies like Apple, Microsoft, Valve and the thousands of smaller software makers (Adobe, Autodesk, Bethesda, Roxio, Zynga, IBM, Oracle, Blizzard, Symantec, Norton, SalesForce.com, Konami, Blackboard...) can still make as much money as they do today and have the same protections they have today.

If you can't well, then we may as well sit around discussing what the world would be like if there was no war, or what kind of tidal waves two moons would generate.

How do you get rid of patents without getting rid of intellectual property? Do you mean setting up better infrastructure for licensing?

According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property, types of intellectual property other than patents include copyright, trademarks, industrial design rights, and trade secrets. You could get rid of patents while keeping those other types of intellectual property.

And what's the efficacy of copyright, trademark, design rights, and trade secrets in protecting a new process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter? The first three are not applicable, and the fourth may protect innovation but comes at the expense of no public disclosure.

Look at ARM. They license design rights and they're pretty successful.

I agree. I don't know how you could have IP without patents.

None. And that's the point. The idea here is to stop granting monopoly on on these areas.

But that won't affect, for example, authors, musicians or marketers. It won't allow anyone to start screening movies without paying royalties, or a new social network called "Facefolio" or proprietary products based on GPL'd code.

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