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Comment by fxtentacle | Hacker News Reader

The US has become a world leader in suing curious people into submission. As soon as you touch any commercially available tech and do anything that the manufacturer dislikes, you're at risk, thanks to § 1201:

"No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title."

Extending your digital camera with new firmware? Illegal.

Inventing a custom ink or add-on for your printer? Illegal.

Repairing a tractor? or a ventilator? Illegal.

How do you expect anyone to get world-leading science done in this environment?

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These are bad things but I have a hard time seeing these as the reason why science is lagging.

Science is lagging in the US because the US has destroyed viable careers in science.

Who does the hard work to get PHd in a scientific field knowing that they'll be saddled with hundreds of thousands of jobs in debt and that there's a good chance that they'll have no employment opportunities after the fact. Especially with the recent destruction of the public sector in scientific jobs, it's probably the worst time ever to get a degree in a field of science.

People do not graduate with a STEM PhD with hundreds of thousands in debt; that is not how the education system works pretty much anywhere in the world.

People who had to pay for their undergrad education in prestigious US colleges do. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/biden-is-right-a-lot-of-s...

But hey, don't let basic research get in the way of confidence, amirite?

Generally true, unless they have large undergrad loans that they weren't able to pay off, which is a real consideration for many.

Your PhD might not put you into hundreds of thousands of debt, but your undergrad very much might in the US. And then you'd have to choose to start a PhD while having hundreds of thousands in debt.

This is the truth. I would love to go back to school and do research to get my PhD. But going back to living on sub-minimum wage to work 80+ hours a week is just not something I can do at this stage of life.

In fairness that sounds like extending capabilities of something that already exists. For personal use that should be okay. For commercial use, that would run afoul of IP -unless we’re talking about open source, though even then you might have obligations depending on the license.

If you want to start from square 1, using your own IP, you should be able to.

Now, sure it sucks that you can’t do those things you mention for ordinary use, which we should, but you are still able to come up with your own ground-up solution for commercial purposes.

> If you want to start from square 1, using your own IP, you should be able to.

Reinventing the universe every time you create something is expensive and impractical. We all stand on the shoulders of giants.

Indeed, this is how companies like Facebook got a head start because they created scrappers for MySpace that made the transition easier. If you try to do the same today, they will likely throw you in federal prison for "tampering" or commit lawfare so heinous it'll feel like a war crime.

> If you want to start from square 1, using your own IP, you should be able to.

That's not remotely how any progress has ever been made in the history of the human race. Newton himself said he stood on the shoulders of giants. Or as Sagan said, to bake an apple pie from scratch, you have to first invent the Universe.

A clever patch to an existing thing is exactly how you get to the next big thing after enough patches.

I don't think people realize how important incremental improvements are. Before open-source software took off, everyone either licensed a proprietary library or invented an ad-hoc solution. If the proprietary library was discontinued, you often couldn't extend or improve it (and even if you could, you couldn't share your changes), so you started over, either from scratch or with another vendor redoing the same work.

This is also why we have so much e-waste: once a manufacturer ditches a product, its usefulness is permanently limited, both by law and practicality. Copyright expires eventually, but so far in the future that we'll all be dead by then.

> that sounds like extending capabilities of something that already exists.

> If you want to start from square 1, using your own IP, you should be able to.

The former is how almost all innovation and invention works. The latter is a myth.

Yes, incremental improvements is how most science gets done.

Similar to Apple Vision Pro being called a development kit. Ironically it was closed from top to bottom.

Doesn't everyone else have things like this too?

They do, on paper, but many countries hardly enforce them. For example, the EU has more caveats to its section-1201-style insanity; China simply doesn't care at all. These copyright treaties are useless in practice and harmful because they ossify a bad system.

The US is the world leader in suing in general, and yet it produces a lot more research than most other legally friendly places... how's that?

I think some people overblow the lawsuit risk in the US. It really does suck here, however one of the benefits to certain types of innovation is that the US has a lot of IP protection infrastructure. Which stiffles innovation in a lot of ways, but also makes investment easier in some cases.

This is true in a way. We are all very free to research and innovate, it is just when you get it in your mind to actually make any money that the lawsuits show up.

Yep, and that is why you raise massive sums of U.S. capital to buy top lawyers lol

We have a lot of money. Smart people can make more money by working here.

Momentum is a large part. I also do think there's somewhat of a motivation that once you've gotten to the top you can sue people who try to displace you into oblivion - ye olde classic "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" syndrome.

Legally risky research, but if it has high enough rewards will eventually end up in the hands of extremely large companies that have the legal backing to do anything they want.

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