Why copyright makes no sense | Hacker News Reader

Why copyright makes no sense

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11 pointsmnaimd11 comments

A scholarly and far more rigorous argument against copyright and patents can be found in Against Intellectual Monopoly by economists Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine. "We show through theory and example that intellectual monopoly is not necessary for innovation and as a practical matter is damaging to growth, prosperity and liberty."

It's a published book you can buy in hard copy (I bought the ebook on Kindle) but practicing what they preach it's freely available online, http://dklevine.com/general/intellectual/againstfinal.htm

The British monarchy created copyright, literally to control what printers were allowed to copy. To enforce this, printing presses were tightly regulated, with severe criminal penalties for operating an unlicensed press. Basically what Big Copyright wants for their own purposes.

Interesting. I didn't know the original purpose was censorship. As far as I can tell, today the only purpose it has is to give you standing to sue and extract rent.

It’s been about control of culture and rent seeking for a long time

You should add [video] to the title.

It's added automatically so they must have edited it. Also [2019] is customary.

Here's a similar discussion from a few weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49622042

> It's added automatically

Thanks, that is what I thought, but I have never submitted a video.

To the OP, it's there for a reason, don't remove it.

Children, please remember:

- RIAA bad, Musk good.

- Artists bad, Altman good.

- Authors bad, Amodei good.

The RIAA is good? The outfit which opened legislation for outrageous sums against random teenagers over a couple of dozen songs? The outfit among others waging war on general-purpose computing? The outfit whose reason to exist is more or less to enclose and privatise the cultural commons that belongs to everyone?

I don't like the big AI firms either, but that doesn't mean I'm going to side with literal IP troll outfits.

The RIAA is indeed quite bad, regardless of Musk. They only exist to further make of copyright a dystopian nightmare.

I guess some people love DRM and further losing control over our owned devices.

It's funny how everyone abandoned the whole "information wants to be free" thing as soon as the AI companies actually indexed the world's information and made it easily accessible.

I think copyright and patents made sense, make sense, and will continue to make sense, but I also think that as the pace of development accelerates the durations for both need to reduce. The products of intellectual work are valuable and it should be worth investing lots of time and effort into producing it - they just shouldn't be worth that much.

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