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Comment by aaronbrethorst | Hacker News Reader

    If I had my way we wouldn't have copyright
    at all. It seems idiotic to me for the same
    reasons patents are.

Excellent news! So it's ok if I copy the images, CSS and HTML on your landing page for your employer for my competitor, then?

Edit: I'm obviously not serious.

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It's not my company, and the things I'm saying don't represent the opinions of my employer.

To your question, is it "ok," I couldn't provide the answer as I don't own the copyright.

My statement was that I wish we lived in a world without copyright. The rules would be very different, and thus we would act and compete differently. As is, brand is an important asset for a company. I think you know all this.

I also think your argument is a bit sophomoric and I find it obnoxious that you are calling out my employer's name.

What do brands have to do with copyright law?

Or are you also advocating for changes to trademark law?

You're right, I'm conflating the two. I mean to be saying intellectual property law in general, which I am not a huge fan of.

If you're against "intellectual property" then you shouldn't use that propaganda term. Refer to the specific legal protections at issue, like copyright, patents, or trademarks, because they are all have very different functions and purposes.

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.html

That's an interesting piece, thanks for sharing. I think from the perspective of "what existing pieces of culture can I use to create something new" IP is actually a useful bucket. From the perspective of people who have already created or are consuming that piece of culture, I agree that combining trademark with copyright and patents is not useful.

Copyrights, patents and trademarks all share a single unifying assumption: ideas are things that can be owned. Since I disagree with that assumption, it makes sense to speak about "disagreeing with intellectual property" if IP is just a synonym for "a legal framework that uses violence to support laws that allow ideas to be owned."

It seems counter intuitive and even foolish to suggest that you could increase innovation and creativity by getting rid of copyrights and patents. But there is a great great example of an industry that actually thrives in both sales and innovation, despite not having any copyrights or patents - the fashion industry.

This TED talk explains it quite well : http://www.ted.com/talks/johanna_blakley_lessons_from_fashio...

The elephant in the corner of your argument is trademarks, which are vigorously protected by fashion labels.

I wouldn't recommend it: the name and logo are trademarked, and even if you replaced those, if anyone noticed the rest of the copying, you'd be the laughingstock of the internet. Who'd want to buy your product then?

Zynga doesn't particularly seem to care about that kind of thing and they're doing pretty ok...

They are?

The exec$ are doing ju$t fine I'm $ure

Worst. Example. Evar.

Zynga only had one profitable year in 2010. They have lost $600 million since then.

I think you're proposing dire consequences where there aren't likely to be any.

Google copying Yahoo's front page code? Okay, that'll be in the news and everyone will have a good laugh.

Some Joe Schmoe Web Developer lifting CSS/HTML from an unknown client to sell to an unknown client? Eh, not so much. This probably happens often and goes undetected.

I wonder how explosive the web's growth would have been if Hyper Text Markup Language was complex, pre-compiled, and invisible to end users.

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