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Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter (now X) and Square (now Block), sparked a weekend’s worth of debate around intellectual property, patents, and copyright, with a characteristically terse post declaring, “delete all IP law.”
X’s current owner Elon Musk quickly replied, “I agree.”
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Talking about “IP” as if it were a single thing confuses any debate. Copyright is not a patent, which is not a trademark - they do different things.
Software patents actually should be deleted. It is impractical to avoid accidentally infringing as there are multiple ways to describe the same system using totally different technical descriptions. Copyright for software was enough.
Thank you for the only based take.
IP law is so fractured that individual US states have different laws that can have international implications. It’s a massive hodgepodge that need to be aligned and nationalized.
Copyright for software is a joke. Software is only copyrightable thing, where mandatory copy is not enforced.
Musk saying something doesn’t reflect on the quality of the idea itself. For many thousands of years people freely imitated whatever they saw that worked, in a process known as “the spread of civilization”, which turned out pretty well for humans. At some point somebody figured out they could get rich by selling copies of other people’s work and paying them a pittence, aka “royalty”, and boom, IP laws were born, and so was the concept that imitation = “stealing”. So now you’re evil if you rub two sticks together without paying somebody - unless they’re evil, then you’re fighting for social justice. It all makes so much sense.
Unexpected good elon take. Patents and copyright laws have probably held us back at least 50 years worth in advancements. So much R&D is just solving problems that have already been solved.
Except what he actually wants is for AI companies to be free to slurp whatever they want, but for average joes to still have the book thrown at them for pirating the Adobe suite.
So delete all pharmaceutical IP to make drugs accessible to everyone and save taxpayers trillions?
“Noooo, not like that!”
This is why it’s a mixed bag for me. IP law is kinda important in a capitalist system, which, for better or worse, that’s what we have. If someone comes up with a wonder drug that outright cures addiction or something, you’d want that person to be able to recoup their costs before a bigger organization with more capital swoops in and undercuts them on production costs until they’re the sole supplier of the drug. The hepatitis C cure drug selling for $70,000 is a great example of this quandary; there’s millions of dollars worth of research and clinical trials that went into developing the drug, you’d want the company to be able to recuperate the costs of developing it or else there’s less incentive to do something similar for other diseases down the line. Also, though, $70,000 or go fucking die is an outrageous statement.
Of course, what we have for IP law in practice is a bastardized monster, where corporations exploit the fuck out of it to have monopoly control over important products like insulins and life-saving medications that cost cents to produce and allow them to sell for hundreds a dose. That’s not the intent of IP law, IMO, and that doesn’t really serve anyone.
In the US the tax payer subsidizes almost all drug research. Between 2010 and 2019 the NIH spent $184 Billion on all but 2 drugs approved by the FDA.
It worked out to about $1.5 Billion for each R&D product with a novel target and about $600 mill for each R&D product with multiple targets.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10148199/
Or
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama-health-forum/fullarticle/2804378
The cost to develop each drug is between about $1 and $2.5 Billion
I’m not sure how much is subsidized outside of NIH but I’d imagine other countries are doing the same.
Why should companies own the whole IP or perhaps why should they have any ownership if most of the funding is from the public?
This is a great point. I know that some pharmas actually do internally funded research, it’s a thing, it happens, but it’s completely dwarfed by shareholder giveaways and government subsidies ofc.
I see the point you’re aiming at, but it’s not little companies discovering new drugs it’s giant corporations (often on the back of government research money) who then ‘swoop in’ to protect their own profits while people in underdeveloped nations die of tuberculosis or whatever because they would rather make money than save lives.
You might be surprised how small medical research labs can be. The lady responsible for nanolipid particles used in transporting rNA vaccines, in similar fashion to how an organelle gets packaged in membrane and cast out, spent decades cruising on bare minimum public funding.
What costs money is testing phases, including a lab to hold and propogate immortal cell lines and later production lines to create enough doses for thousands of human trials.
Although tbh I don’t expect the USA to be upholding strict drug safety standards in the near future.
What costs money is testing phases, including a lab to hold and propogate immortal cell lines and later production lines to create enough doses for thousands of human trials.
Thank you. These arguments are always hard to read. Sure, small labs are where it usually starts, but without enormous and risky investments, we would never have the drugs we have today. Most of these investments fail miserably, so one successful drug must cover the costs of ten unsuccessful ones. Nobody would do that if their IP weren’t protected. It’s more about reputation than facts when it comes to this topic.
Unless it were completely government funded, but that’s clearly not was Illegal Immigrant Billionaire Elon Musk and the Orange Felon are proposing so yeah, IP Laws applying to Pharmaceuticals all the way.
I was speaking generally and obviously there are exceptions and contributions from all over the place. But it’s not tiny labs like that that hold a death-grip on the patents to drugs that are being sold for absurd amounts of money that are far out of reach of the people who need them. Also while I recognize that this kind of research is expensive it must also be recognized that much of that research is funded, directly or indirectly, by the US government through the National Institutes of Health, Centers for Disease Control, etc, so the fact that these big corporations are effectively getting a hand-out and then charging an arm and a leg for it sticks in my craw. But then maybe I’m just weird for thinking that human life is more important than quarterly profits.
idk i think our incentive should be to cure diseases with public funding and make people healthy instead of for profit but what do i know
Companies will not — ever — dump hundreds of millions/billions into developing a drug only to have it be sold at cost or even worse, completely losing out on it when a competitor sells a copy of it at a price you can’t match.
And even if they did suddenly turn to altruism like that, they’d very quickly go bankrupt.
Why would anybody spend billions making new drugs if they knew with 100% certainty that they’d never make the money back?
We may not like it, but that’s the system that we have. Some form of IP law should exist to encourage these companies to continue putting out medicines that better our lives, it’s just that our current ones go way too far.
We already fund the research of new drugs almost entirely through publicly funded projects which then HAND OVER the patent rights to whichever company has the most former board members in the executive branch at the time.
I watched it happen in real time during covid while working for the DPH. Those companies produce NOTHING. They are the literal obstacle to creating new medicines and making them widely available.
I’m against the context of the main post but putting on a cape for medical patents is wild. The entirety of healthcare in america is inexcusable. Let’s stay focused on the AI tech oligarchs robbing us of our futures and attempting to frame it as a concern with intellectual property.
If it’s state funded then that’s obviously a different matter.
But usually it’s a company making drugs, and they’d go bust if they spent billions developing a drug and got zero money back. Then there would be far fewer drugs made.
Be practical. Letting people die for ideological reasons is not a good thing.
How, when more companies would be able to develop the same drug? And they don’t develop drugs, they develop ways to extend their patents.
More companies will develop that drug.
But think of it this way. You’re the CEO of a pharmaceutical company that makes drugs, vaccines, etc that saves lives. You do this for a profit.
You’re presented with a plan to make a drug that, idk, lessens the symptoms of Crohn’s Disease. It’ll cost $2 billion to create and bring to market.
After it’s done being created, and the drug spends 10+ years in clinical testing, it’s on shelves. You have to price each box at $10 in order to break even after 5 years, so you do so.
But the law has changed, now anybody can manufacture the drug. A competitor who didn’t foot any of the development costs or do any of the hard work is selling each box at $0.80. you can’t compete with that, you make an enormous loss and your company edges closer to bankruptcy.
One of your workers comes to you with plans for a $2bn project that will hopefully reduce migraines. Given lessons learned from the previous example, do you go ahead with the plan? Will the board even let you?
I agree that IP laws in the sector need to be pared down, but scrapping them entirely would prevent any company from creating new drugs, as they’d be absolutely certain they wouldn’t be able to recoup development and regulatory hurdle costs.
In an ideal world, all drugs would be made by governments, for a loss, and open sourced, so the market could compete on price. But that’s not the world we live in.
I wrote a long winded reply but honestly I’ll just say that your second paragraph is entirely based on fiction and your final paragraph is precisely what for profit medicine is designed to do. Profit is a purely ideological drive, medicine and healthcare do not need profits to exist. The post office does not need to make money. It exists because we HAVE to have it.
You can go see for yourself. Moderna did not single handedly make the covid vaccine. They do not and should not have the right to deny anyone the right to produce it as cheaply as necessary to provide it to their populations. I can go deeper if you want but if this doesn’t show you that we are saying the same thing I’m going to have doubts about this being in good faith.
It’s not fiction, that’s the reality.
Profit is a purely ideological drive, medicine and healthcare do not need profits to exist.
No shit. Everyone knows that. But it does exist. That’s the world we live in. Income tax doesn’t need to exist, but it does, and things would go wrong if you suddenly stopped paying it.
Moderna did not single handedly make the covid vaccine
Who said they did? Many companies did, and some had government or university help.
I can go deeper if you want
Go as deep as you like. I’ve already explained the situation, though.
I am speaking in good faith. How do you go about avoiding companies simply refusing to create new medications when they know for a fact making new ones would cost billions and they’d never get the money back?
I don’t like that that’s the situation. I want companies to make medications and sell them at a loss, but that’s a fantasy world. I’m being pragmatic. We can improve IP laws without completely killing off future medicine development.
“Just, like, don’t make profit, broooo” would be nice, but that’s not how the world works.
If you only funded drugs through public funding, that means the government has a say in what drugs get funded and which don’t, meaning any and all drugs that don’t affect the broadest number of people simply won’t get funded.
Drugs will no longer be for all people, it’ll be strictly the people that vote for the government in charge. So… No hormone treatments, no birth control, no vaccines, no aids research, nothing that doesn’t explicitly align with the government.
First of all, governments already do fund all the research.
Even in your hypothetical, thats just one government. It doesn’t stop medical advancement entirely just because one dictatorship stops funding research. It moves elsewhere. When nazi germany declared that nobody would receive funding for anything outside of Aryan research ^tm the scientists just left to a country that wasn’t barbarically stupid.
Also, everything in your final paragraph is stuff that is happening now, in america, under the capitalist organization of the economy which gives all the rights to a private company after publicly funding the research and development of their drugs. It makes no difference, save the fact that now the authoritarian government in power has consolidated billions of dollars for rich capitalists who will gladly accept the orders to no longer produce those medicines while remaining disgustingly wealthy.
Even if you believe in the delusional idea that private companies are funding the development of novel treatments entirely on their own the fact remains that drugs are currently, as we speak, not for all people. I am pointing out the solution to that problem, and the response was to point out how, if we did what I said, then what’s already happening now would be the consequence.
Except no, they don’t.
I agree, though I will note that I have often found that there is a non-trivial gap between what is and what ought to be.
The development of new medications should be 100% funded by governments and the IP that comes out of it should be 100% if the government, aka the people.
Governments are the ones that do the investments of projects that don’t directly make money but are good for humanity.
You don’t like that and the hepac drug can suddenly cost 70 dollars
You’re right.
The problem I mostly have is even when those costs are recouped most companies fight tooth and nail to keep the prices high and unaffordable in order to line the pockets of investors.
Yes, 100%.
Lol we all know trump would put pharmaceuticals on the exemption list.
Do it., but also ensure that all work enters the public domain and is free for anyone to use, modify, commercialize, or basically whatever the GPL says.
Nonono, see, they will have punitive contracts with employees that will nail them to the wall if they leak source code.
They like rules as long as they’re the one writing them.
“I don’t think so. Whatever is yours is ours, whatever is ours stays ours. Thank you for understanding.”
—Microsoft et al.
That’s what would happen if copyright doesn’t exist. If a company releases something, it’s immediately public domain, because no law protects it.
GPL
The GPL is very much not the public domain.
It’s an interesting point that without any IP law, GPL would be invalid and corporations could use and modify things like Lemmy without complying with the license.
Exactly. They wouldn’t be obligated to contribute back at all, so someone like Meta could just rebrand Lemmy into something else and throw ads everywhere.
They already could. Lemmy’s users are not the ones who run the software. It’s like Google’s usage of Linux. They can keep their changes to themselves.
They can only keep them to themselves if they don’t distribute the changes. Since Google distributes Android, they need to release their changes to Linux on Android under the GPL. Since they don’t distribute their server code, they don’t need to share their changes.
But then corporations could not stop anyone from modifying their modifications to things like Lemmy.
Well, they wouldn’t need to release those changes publicly.
But then anyone could take them anyway.
The GPL is basically trying to make a world without copyright. The GPL basically only has teeth in a world where copyright exists. If copyright didn’t exist then everything would be in the public domain and the GPL would be toothless, but that’s fine because it would no longer be unnecessary.
No, the GPL very much requires copyright to work. The whole point is copyleft, which obligates changes to the code remain under the same license and be available to everyone.
Without copyright, companies just wouldn’t share their changes at all. The whole TIVO-ization clause in the GPL v3 would be irrelevant since TIVO can very much take without giving back. Copyright is very much essential to the whole concept of the GPL working.
Just think, why would anyone want to use Linux if Microsoft or Apple could just bake Linux into their offering?
No, the GPL very much requires copyright to work
That’s what I said.
If copyright didn’t exist then everything would be in the public domain and the GPL would be toothless, but that’s fine because it would no longer be unnecessary.
I’m saying it is necessary to achieve the aims of the GPL.
If it was just about ensuring the source is free, the MIT license would be sufficient. The GPL goes further and forces modifications to also be free, which relies on copyright.
I’m saying it is necessary to achieve the aims of the GPL.
Which would make GPL toothless, but that’s fine because it would no longer be necessary.
I’m saying it is necessary to achieve the aims of the GPL.
Until copyright no longer exists and everything is in the public domain, as I said.
How are you going to enforce the GPL in a world where copyright doesn’t exist?
How are you going to enforce the GPL in a world where copyright doesn’t exist?
And that’s what I’m saying, you can’t, therefore the aims of the GPL cannot be achieved. The GPL was created specifically to force modifications to be shared. The MIT license was created to be as close to public domain as possible, but within a copyright context (the only obligation is to retain the license text on source distributions).
If everything is public domain, then there would be no functional changes to MIT-licensed code, whereas GPL-licensed code would become a free-for-all with companies no longer being obligated to share their changes.
So basically the bluesky source code is now public domain?
I’m fully in favour of abolishing IP law for everyone, ideally globally.
Public domain everything.
This is a horrible idea. Why would an author dedicate years of their life to a book only to make no money off of it. Why would I spend time and money prototyping a new invention only to not see a dime from it as a big company steals my idea.
People need to eat and live. If you can’t survive by creating, you do something else instead of creating. How can people not see this very simple concept?
You could literally write the next Lord of the Rings and another company could print and sell the book, sell merch, and make a movie about it and you’d see 0 money. But no one would make movies any more because what’s the point?
All these indie games disrupting the gaming industry, gone. Game dev takes a lot of time and money, guess big companies will be the only ones who can afford to do it. The indie guy trying to sell his game for 5$ will be buried by a company that steals it and dumps a few hundred K into it to make a better version and the original creator is left with nothing.
People think about getting an the stuff from companies for free and forget that big companies would benefit most with no protection to the little guy. There is a reason why the rich want to do this, honestly think about it.
The rich want to do it because of AI. That’s it.
They can already take whatever you create wihout giving you a dime. What are you gonna do, sue a multi-billion dollar company with a fleet of attorneys on standby? With what money?
They would certainly just settle and give you a pittance just about large enough to cover your attorney fees.
Do you know why companies usually don’t do this? Because they have sufficiently many people hired who do nothing but create stories for the company full time. They do not need your ideas.
Copyright didn’t exist for millenia. It didn’t stop authors from writing books.
Small companies have defend themselves from Apple. People make money from their inventions and writings. There are tons of examples. You’re creating this idea of unbeatable huge corpos that isn’t true. They don’t always win, you can easily prove with with a 1 minute Google search.
They also don’t want it just because of AI, this would enable them to steal and mass produce any IP anyone makes. This includes physical inventions.
Also copyright didn’t exist for a long time and neither did the Internet or global trade. Times change. We went millennia without many things, it doesn’t automatically make them wrong or bad. What a silly basis.
The cases where large companies do win won’t make news though. “Large companies settles with individual” isn’t really headline material now, is it?
Also, small companies != people. Neither me nor you are a company and even small companies have significantly more resources available to them than someone who just created the next Lord of the Rings and didn’t see a penny.
There are significantly more companies who would rather start killing politicians than see IP law gone. They rake in billions of shareholder value, much moreso than any AI company out there.
I never argued that copyright law is necessarily wrong or bad just because we went millenia without it. What I am arguing is that these laws do not allow people to create intellectual works as people in the past were no less artistic than we are today - maybe even moreso.
Have you seen the impact of IP law on science? It’s horrible. No researcher sees any money from their works - rather they must pay to lose their “rights” and have papers published. Scientific journals have hampered scientific progress and will continue to do so for as long as IP law remains. I would not be surprised if millions of needless deaths could have been prevented if only every medical researcher had access to research.
IP law serves solely large companies and independent artists see a couple of breadcrumbs. Abolishing IP law - or at the very least limiting it to a couple of years at most - would have hardly any impact on small artists. The vast, vast, VAST majority of artists make hardly any money already. Just check Bandcamp or itch.io and see how many millions of artists there are who will never ever see success. They do not benefit from IP law - so why should we keep it for the top 0.1% of artists who do?
The cases where large companies do win won’t make news though. “Large companies settles with individual” isn’t really headline material now, is it?
Ok, and not every time a person wins there’s a headline either, this is a moot point.
Also, small companies != people. Neither me nor you are a company and even small companies have significantly more resources available to them than someone who just created the next Lord of the Rings and didn’t see a penny.
So, what is your point? People can win against big companies, even over IP. It has been done before, if you want I can list a bunch for you. I just researched to make sure I wasn’t off base. You don’t always have to have the most money to win. You know why? Because of IP law, the very thing you want to destroy.
There are significantly more companies who would rather start killing politicians than see IP law gone. They rake in billions of shareholder value, much moreso than any AI company out there.
Ok, and? Because a company makes money due to X doesn’t automatically make X a bad thing. I’ve not seen one good plan laid out on how destorying IP would help the common man, it doesn’t.
I never argued that copyright law is necessarily wrong or bad just because we went millenia without it.
No, but you are clearly implying something with “Copyright didn’t exist for millenia. It didn’t stop authors from writing books.” This ignores that those authors couldn’t have their work downloaded and spread across the globe in minutes. You are bringing this up to prove a point, but give how much things have changes over the last few hundred years, the point falls flat. It is irrelevant once you look at all the nuance and reasons why and how they were able to create.
What I am arguing is that these laws do not allow people to create intellectual works as people in the past were no less artistic than we are today - maybe even moreso.
They do allow them. They allow them to make money off of their art. Back in the day you didn’t have an interconnected global economy, you didn’t have to worry about retirement or your 401k, of course it was easier back then, late stage capitalism didn’t set in. But IP laws are what protect creators these days, so they can take a year off of work and write a book and still be able to eat.
Have you seen the impact of IP law on science? It’s horrible. No researcher sees any money from their works - rather they must pay to lose their “rights” and have papers published. Scientific journals have hampered scientific progress and will continue to do so for as long as IP law remains. I would not be surprised if millions of needless deaths could have been prevented if only every medical researcher had access to research.
Yes, absolutely a good point. But because a system is broken is not a reason to get rid of it. The legal system is broken and millionaires just get away with crimes, should we just get rid of all the laws? No. We should work to make them better.
IP law serves solely large companies and independent artists see a couple of breadcrumbs.
Source needed. Because this is a bold claim, that based on what I can find, is not true. People sell IP to companies all the time, so yes they then benefit from it, but the creator of the IP gets paid.
You brought up how lives have probably been lost because of scientific journal IP. How many lives do you think will be lost when big pharma realizes there’s no money in creating a vaccine for a new disease? Who is making that investment? The govt? lol
Abolishing IP law - or at the very least limiting it to a couple of years at most - would have hardly any impact on small artists. It would directly impart them! The small artist who had a good beat or came up with some slick lyrics would have them jacked. Every production company would be scrapping small artists looking for what they could take or steal, with 0 impact. This also goes with authors and writing books. How can they sign a book deal when a publisher can’t guarantee it won’t just get copied and given away? They now have no reason to pay authors.
They do not benefit from IP law - so why should we keep it for the top 0.1% of artists who do?
They ABOLUSTLY do benefit from it, you’re just looking at it as a “less money needs less protection” lens which I highly disagree with. A small artist can have a lot going for them and miss their opportunity because they were stolen. Or they were sampled and never for paid but the person who sampled them got rich. I mean there are dozens of ways to see why this would be a problem. The least of which is, why even make music or movies anymore? If every movie and song ever created can be legally pirated, companies just stop making them.
IP laws help everyone. EVERYONE. Just because companies make money off of them doesn’t make them bad. Just because small creators don’t make a lot of money doesn’t mean they shouldn’t own what they create. Everyone in favor of this just seems to want stuff for free without realizing the impact of that choice, it’s extremely shortsighted.
I never argued that copyright law is necessarily wrong or bad just because we went millenia without it.
You’re right. As we all know people only started to create art after IP laws where established.
Nobody ever made something original just for the joy of it. It’s only fair that a single company has the exclusive rights on a pants-wearing mouse that looks a certain way for 95 years.
This is a bad faith argument.
Forms of IP have existed for a long time. And back in your days you didn’t have one company that could have global reach in second.
You still ignore the fact that if I spend 5 years of my life writing a book, it could be taken away with no money to me. So people can no longer dedicate their lives to creating when they have bills to pay.
Have you considered that the problem of not being able to create art for recreational purposes without thinking about its monetary value is the actual issue here?
Yes, I have.
But how exactly does getting rid of IP laws since that exactly? Because that’s what’s being proposed.
Sorry if I wasn’t clear about that. Abolishing IP laws won’t fix capitalism.
There are other solutions for that. Most of them as unrealistic as abolishing IP laws. But we could try universal basic income as a stopgap.
I think UBI would actually solve a lot of issues, the creative communities’ financial struggle being one of them.
I suspect that isn’t the picture these two have in mind. It’s going to be the same as Musk’s demand for free speech, which just turns out to mean “let me be an asshole and you’re not allowed to complain.” This one is going to be “I get to profit off your ideas, but you’re not allowed to use mine.”
That would just ensure that no one ever commits resources to developing something new…
It’ll affect it, but it won’t stop it. This is a good question to bring up though.
I design medical devices. IP is incredibly important in this process to protect our R&D investment in the current system. If IP didn’t exist, we’d protect that through other means like obfuscation of function.
Also if IP didn’t exist, I could design devices that are so much better at healing people. So much of what I do is restricted because someone else has 30 years left on what they patented.
R&D is expensive. Just because you see what someone else did, doesn’t mean you can easily replicate it.
In short: if your goal is pure profit, yeah removing IP probably hurts this a little. If your goal is producing the best product, then get rid of it.
I think the best solution would be a much shorter exclusionary period for patents.
Obfuscating how things work and trade secrets mean some knowledge is never shared. The ideal behind the patent system is that information is made public but protected for a limited time. The system has strayed from the ideal, but there is still a need for it.
Patents in the US and most countries expire 20 years after filing or 17 years after issuing. It’s not 30 years.
Cory Doctorow has made a pretty convincing argument that in your real specifically, all designs should be open source. That way, if a company goes bankrupt or simply stops supporting a device, like (say) an implant that allows them to see, or a pacemaker, or whatever, they can pursue repairs without the help of the OEM.
Open source is effectively no different than public domain in this circumstance. You don’t have less rights
Capitalism stifles innovation
deleted by creator
So much of what I do is restricted because someone else has 30 years left on what they patented.
If they didn’t patent it, that technology never would have existed in the first place for you to steal from.
I think the best solution would be a much shorter exclusionary period for patents.
100% agreed on that account.
In short: if your goal is pure profit, yeah removing IP probably hurts this a little
“A little”? If there’s no IP you just pay a janitor or an employee a million bucks to send you all the information and documentation and you manufacture the product yourself and undercut the company actually engineering the product so they can never be profitable.
Like, this all seems very obvious to me…
that technology never would have existed in the first place
Oh gee, a wildly incorrect assumption
Oh gee, a rational contradiction supported with evidence.
People made stuff before patents existed. In many cases there were certain people and groups that were sought out because they simply did things better than others who made the same things.
Knowing how someone else makes something doesn’t mean you can make it as well as the other person. Making quality goods is the same as cooking meals, the people and techniques are far more important than the designs.
That was fine before mass production made perfect copies possible on an industrial scale.
You don’t need the person when you can copy the object and produce it at volume and scale because you already own the factories.
Mass production copies are far from perfect. Like the dollar store version of anything is shit tier even if it looks the same. I’m not talking snobby high end or anything, just well made vs trash tier.
Hell, most of the goods we buy are made by a factory contracted with the person who designed and distributes the materials. That was true before we moved manufacturing overseas too. Cars were one of the few factories that were owned and operated by the companies that design and distribute the goods.
Mass production started long before cars. The industrial revolution began in the 17th century. Interchangeable parts was invented by Eli Whitney. He showed a flint lock that could be assembled by anyone, instead of a skilled metal worker that needed to customize each part so they fit together perfectly.
Outside of art, machine made parts are far more perfect than hand crafted.
People made stuff before patents existed.
People also didn’t make stuff before patents existed. That’s why they exist.
Knowing how someone else makes something doesn’t mean you can make it as well as the other person.
Not necessarily, but often you can. You also don’t have to, you just have to make it cheaper, which you can because you are benefitting from someone else’s investment.
The fact we’re not all still using oldawan industry proves you false
…no? It doesn’t.
People also didn’t make stuff before patents existed. That’s why they exist.
What didn’t they make?
Not necessarily, but often you can. You also don’t have to, you just have to make it cheaper, which you can because you are benefitting from someone else’s investment.
How many restaurants make fries? How many companies make a drink called cola? Are they all identical?
Why do they keep making making those prodicts when they aren’t covered by patents?
I don’t know. They didn’t make them.
People famously invented nothing before copyright law.
No no no the world has always worked the way my flawed ideology requires!!!
That’s why the Sistine Chapel has the little © 1512 painted in the corner
The internet famously didn’t exist before copyright law. People also famously steal all IP in China.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Request_for_Comments
Your choice example of technology to support IP laws is… something that was created publically and is a collection of open, public standards 🤦🤦🤦 do you think the internet is patented…? By who??? Lmao
The internet is literally the peak example that proves IP laws are unnecessary for innovation and actually inhibits it. And yes, good observation that IP laws predate the internet. They are antiquated by it and no longer relevant in a post-internet world.
Your choice example of technology to support IP laws is… something that was created publically and is a collection of open, public standards
No 🤦♂️🤦♂️🤦♂️ you’re intentionally misrepresenting my statement.
So here’s your chance to clarify your statement and represent it the way you intended
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Did you not notice that almost the entire realm of technology runs on open source software largely written by volunteers? Yes your laptop may run a proprietary piece of software but not the servers it talks to, your phone, your apps, the cash register at the store, the computer chip in your kids toys etc…
Now imagine if ip laws were removed. Any company could take open source work and sell it as their own while ignoring any GPL that requires the source code to be distributed.
I would point at Android as an example of what would happen. It’s not public domain but the end result is similar, namely that the open source originator (AOSP) suffers from a severe lack of features compared to the commercial offerings.
The default AOSP apps are incredibly barebones compared to the ones Google and the carriers put in their ROMs. You have to choose between “have nothing more than the basic features and compatibility with only well-established services” or “get the latest and greatest with all the bells and whistles (plus a huge heaping of telemetry and invasive advertising)”.
It turns out it’s really hard to compete with a major corporation who can throw entire teams at a problem and can legally copy anything you add to your own version. That’s not even getting into the things that open source projects lack due to their haphazard team structure such as unified UX designs (Blender pre-2.8 and GIMP pre-3.0/unified window mode being the most famous examples of terrible user interfaces that lingered for far too many years).
Yet they did it anyway, my point is about the power of our intrinsic motivation to create, not our obvious need for food and shelter etc…
Do you not notice that those volunteers have bills to pay and need jobs and income from somewhere? The world doesn’t run on goodwill.
So… what, are you denying that open source software exists because people have to pay bills…?
The point is every business cannot be a volunteer organization. And those companies that build that sort of infrastructure are supported by larger, proprietary companies.
That’s only true of the too few people that control too much resources
Huh?
Read Debt by David Graeber.
Instead of explaining what you mean, you’re just going to casually suggest they read a roughly 500 page book and hope that clears it up for them?
Yes.
No.
The large majority of resources and facilities are owned by a small minority of wealthy individuals whose only goal is making money. People with more interest and passion in the field in question would continue to innovate as long as they had the resources to do so.
People with more interest and passion in the field in question would continue to innovate as long as they had the resources to do so.
But…they don’t. And if you removed IP law then they still wouldn’t…
I’ll have to look at that later.
Not strictly true, if we’re talking about pharmaceuticals or other types of trade information, it would lead us back to a world of fiercely guarded corporate secrets. Here’s your medicine drug, but we won’t tell you anything about how its made or whats in it.
Not necessarily? You’d retain first-to-market advantages, particularly where implementation is capital-heavy - and if that’s not enough you could consider an alternative approach to rewarding innovation such as having a payout or other advantage for individuals or entities which undertake significant research and development to emerge with an innovative product.
I think the idea that nobody would commit to developing anything in the absence of intellectual property law is also maybe a bit too cynical? People regularly do invest resources into developing things for the public domain.
At the very least, innovations developed with a significant amount of public funding - such as those which emerge from research universities with public funding or collaborative public-private endeavours at e.g. pharmaceutical companies - should be placed into the public domain for everybody to benefit from, and the copyright period should be substantially reduced to something more like five years.
Felt like it was pretty clearly hyperbolic.
People who work in public domain also need jobs to sustain their ability to do so.
Yes, but sometimes producing for the public domain is their job. Sponsorships, grants, and other funding instruments exist for people who do work which is committed to the public domain.
Yes, but sometimes producing for the public domain is their job.
Which is paid for most often by proprietary companies. Take a look at the OBS webpage.
Right, because no one ever does anything for reasons other than money. You definitely get paid to clean up the neighborhood park or help your buddy move right?
Right, because no one ever does anything for reasons other than money.
Of course they do. What they don’t do is spend millions of dollars in R&D with no assurance that it won’t be stolen and duplicated by someone else who then sells the same product for a quarter of the price…
You’re right, no one spends millions of dollars in R&D without expecting to earn a profit from it…
They spend hundreds of billions instead.
President Biden’s budget proposal for FY2025 includes approximately $201.9 billion for R&D, $7.4 billion (4%) above the FY2024 estimated level of $194.6 billion (see figure). Adjusted for inflation to FY2023 dollars, the President’s FY2025 R&D proposal represents a constant-dollar increase of 1.5% above the FY2024 estimated level.
…that’s the government
…and that’s moving the goalposts.
In my initial comment I said ‘no one’, and your first reply did not narrow the scope. I even said ‘no one’ again in my reply and you did not narrow the scope then either. So the standard was ‘no one does this’, except I’ve now shown an example of someone who does, so trying to qualify that now by adding some new arbitrary standard is just moving the goalposts. If the government does it then the fact that no one does it is false, isn’t it?
I didn’t move anything, you’re just playing stupid semantics games to win internet points. I have no interest in such vapid arguments.
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Nobody does anything anymore and we’ll all just die. Gotcha.
Yes that’s totally what I said.
Busting of telecom monopolies doesn’t lead to nobody building telecom infrastructure. And without state monopoly on alcohol production alcohol drinks don’t become a deficit. They just become cheaper and less incentivizing - that’s considered, but you have to solve deadlocks.
I agree with your overall point and am not trying to argue against it, but rather to provide an interesting historical fact: I happen to know of one example where this did in fact lead to nobody building telecom infrastructure in an area.
I lived in Albuquerque, NM in the late 90s/early 2000s when telcos were rolling out DSL infrastructure across the country. The local telco, US West, refused to do so (largely because their POTS network was aging and rickety at the best of times - the phone line hookup to my apartment building was still using old gel-pack connectors from the 60s), even after being taken to court over it, and happily paid $200k/mo in fines for a couple years to avoid doing so. It wasn’t until US West was bought out by Qwest in 2000 that they finally rolled out DSL. I am generally extremely anti-monopoly so I think the break-up was definitely a good thing, but I attribute this to the break-up because a larger company would be in a better position to mitigate the costs of upgrading the infrastructure in one area with the profits from another or whatever.
because a larger company would be in a better position to mitigate the costs of upgrading the infrastructure in one area with the profits from another or whatever.
In this case it appears that it was a small monopoly. Where I live one can generally change a telco without changing your physical exact location. Lots of clumsy wires though under the ceiling near the elevator.
But that was off topic, I’ll add one small point - a bigger company could do what you described too.
Sure, and I haven’t used a telco in ~20 years unless you count cell carriers. But yeah I’m by no means saying bigger companies are necessarily better about this, as I said, just that this is a curious counter-example to your earlier claim that breaking up the telco monopoly didn’t lead to nobody building telecom infrastructure.
I don’t understand what any of that has to do with the topic at hand…?
IP law does 3 things that are incredibly important… but have been basically irrelevant between roughly 1995-2023.
- Accurate attribution. Knowing who actually made a thing is super important for the continued development of ideas, as well as just granting some dignity to the inventor/author/creator.
- Faithful reproduction. Historically, bootleg copies of things would often be abridged to save costs or modified to suit the politics of the bootlegger, but would still be sold under the original title. It’s important to know what the canonical original content is, if you’re going to judge it fairly and respond to it.
- Preventing bootleggers from outcompeting original creators through scale.
Digital technology made these irrelevant for a while, because search engines could easily answer #1, digital copies are usually exact copies so #2 was not an issue, and digital distribution made #3 (scale) much more balanced.
But then came AI. And suddenly all 3 of these concerns are valid again. And we’ve got a population who just spent the past 30 years living in a world where IP law had zero upsides and massive downsides.
There’s no question that IP law is due for an overhaul. The question is: will we remember that it ever did anything useful, or will we exchange one regime of fatcats fucking over culture for another one?
How does genai make those concerns valid again?
Make yourself the question: how does genai respect these 3 boundaries set by IP law? All providers of Generative AI services should be forced by law to explicitly estate this.
I’m still not getting it. What does generative AI have to do with attribution? Like, at all.
I can train a model on a billion pictures from open, free sources that were specifically donated for that purpose and it’ll be able to generate realistic pictures of those things with infinite variation. Every time it generates an image it’s just using logic and RNG to come up with options.
Do we attribute the images to the RNG god or something? It doesn’t make sense that attribution come into play here.
I would like to take a crack at this. There is this recent trend going around with ghiblifying one’s picture. Its basically converting a picture into ghibli image. If you had trained it on free sources, this is not possible.
Internally an LLM works by having networks which activate based on certain signals. When you ask it a certain question. It creates a network of similar looking words and then gives it back to you. When u convert an image, you are doing something similar. You cannot form these networks and the threshold at which they activate without seeing copyrighted images from studio ghibli. There is no way in hell or heaven for that to happen.
OpenAI trained their models on pirated things just like meta did. So when an AI produces an image in style of something, it should attribute the person from which it actually took it. Thats not whats happening. Instead it just makes more money for the thief.
If you hired someone to copy Ghibli’s style, then fed that into an AI as training data, it would completely negate your entire argument.
It is not illegal for an artist to copy someone else’s style. They can’t copy another artist’s work—that’s a derivative—but copying their style is perfectly legal. You can’t copyright a style.
All of that is irrelevant, however. The argument is that—somehow—training an AI with anything is somehow a violation of copyright. It is not. It is absolutely 100% not a violation of copyright to do that!
Copyright is all about distribution rights. Anyone can download whatever TF they want and they’re not violating anyone’s copyright. It’s the entity that sent the person the copyright that violated the law. Therefore, Meta, OpenAI, et al can host enormous libraries of copyrighted data in their data centers and use that to train their AI. It’s not illegal at all.
When some AI model produces a work that’s so similar to an original work that anyone would recognize it, “yeah, that’s from Spirited Away” then yes: They violated Ghibli’s copyright.
If the model produces an image of some random person in the style of Studio Ghibli that is not violating anyone’s copyright. It is not illegal nor is it immoral. No one is deprived of anything in such a transaction.
I think your understanding of generative AI is incorrect. It’s not just “logic and RNG” It is using training data (read as both copyrighted and uncopyrighted material) to come up with a model of “correctness” or “expectedness”. If you then give it a pattern, (read as question or prompt) it checks its “expectedness” model for whatever should come next. If you ask it “how many cups in a pint” it will check the most common thing it has seen after that exact string of words it in its training data: 2. If you ask for a picture of something “in the style of van gogh”, it will spit out something with thick paint and swirls, as those are the characteristics of the pictures in its training data that have been tagged with “Van Gogh”. These responses are not brand new, they are merely a representation of the training data that would most work as a response to your request. In this case, if any of the training data is copyrighted, then attribution must be given, or at the very least permission to use this data must be given by the current copyright holder.
I think your understanding of generative AI is incorrect. It’s not just “logic and RNG”…
If it runs on a computer, it’s literally “just logic and RNG”. It’s all transistors, memory, and an RNG.
The data used to train an AI model is copyrighted. It’s impossible for something to exist without copyright (in the past 100 years). Even public domain works had copyright at some point.
if any of the training data is copyrighted, then attribution must be given, or at the very least permission to use this data must be given by the current copyright holder.
This is not correct. Every artist ever has been trained with copyrighted works, yet they don’t have to recite every single picture they’ve seen or book they’ve ever read whenever they produce something.
If it runs on a computer, it’s literally “just logic and RNG”. It’s all transistors, memory, and an RNG.
Sure, but this is a bad faith argument. You can say this about anything. Everything is made up of other stuff, it’s what someone has done to combine or use those elements that matters. You could extend this to anything proprietary. Manufacturing equipment is just a handful of metals, rubbers, and plastics. However, the context in which someone uses those materials is what matters when determining if copyright laws have been broken.
The data used to train an AI model is copyrighted. It’s impossible for something to exist without copyright (in the past 100 years). Even public domain works had copyright at some point.
If the data used to train the model was copyrighted data acquired without explicit permission from the data owners, it itself cannot be copyrighted. You can’t take something copyrighted by someone else, put it in a group of stuff that is also copyrighted by others, and claim you have some form of ownership over that collection of works.
This is not correct. Every artist ever has been trained with copyrighted works, yet they don’t have to recite every single picture they’ve seen or book they’ve ever read whenever they produce something.
You speak confidently, but I don’t think you understand the problem area enough to act as an authority on the topic.
Laws can be different for individuals and companies. Hell, laws of use can be different for two different individuals, and the copyright owner actually gets a say in how their thing can be used by different groups of people. For instance, for a 3d art software, students can use it for free. However, their use agreement is that they cannot profit off of anything they make. Non students have to pay, but can sell their work without consequences. Companies have to pay even more, but often times get bulk discounts if they are buying licenses for their whole team.
Artists have something of value: AI training data. We know this is valuable to AI training companies, because artists are getting reached out to by AI companies, asking to sell them the rights to train their model on their data. If AI companies just use an artist’s AI training data without their permission, it’s stealing the potential revenue they could have made selling it to a different AI company. Taking away revenue potential on someone’s work is the basis for having violated copyright/fair use laws.
I’ve decided all of your comments are all mine, I’m feeding them into an AI which approximates you except ends every statement with how stupid and lame it is. It talks a lot about gayness as a side effect of that, in a derogatory manner.
Would you like me to stop?
I’m yet to see how AI makes #2 relevant.
1&2 solved by digital signature
3 both never happens and when it happens IP laws can’t really stop it
Are we pretending metadata on images and sounds actually work and don’t get scrubbed almost immediately?
They don’t want to delete all IP law, they just want to delete the IP law which is preventing them from postponing the collapse of the AI hype a little bit more.
They want to do this so they can feed their ai models.
You can tell China is making strides when suddenly IP laws are a nuisance rather than a fundamental value of the American system lol
Our models
This isn’t as forward thinking as you’d want it to be.
For as much as they are abused, “IP laws” protect small and individual inventors, writers, composers, etc.
With no patent, copyright or trademark protections the billionaires will own or bury everything.
What is needed is to bring the laws back to their intended purpose.
Fundamentally it should be an attribution and reward system, whereas currently it’s a false scarcity system.
Everyone should be able to use everything, but you should be required to attribute your source material. If you do, the song / work etc should get an extra licensing fee per play. That way you’re always encouraged to provide attribution since you don’t lose money from it, and wholly original works will be cheaper and thus more desirable.
Not dissimilar to how song sampling works today but without all the manual negotiation for every license.
And if you fail to provide attribution you get hit with appropriate penalties.
The problem with attribution is the difficulty of 1000% accurate compliance.
If you grab 100 lines of code from a repository, or five paragraphs from a story, there’s probably a claim there. If you grab a single word, there’s probably not. But in the middle, there’s a paralysis of uncertainty-- is n lines similar enough to create liability? Can you remember where you saw what reliably? You end up with a bias towards “over-attribution” and it becomes difficult to pare it back. Does everything need a full Git-style commit history? Are we forever stuck keeping a credit on a project because it’s difficult to prove you’ve fully scrubbed their contributions?
Focus on how we pay artists (ideally lush grants) and forget about credit. Maybe establish a culture where it’s voluntary and acceptable-- that people feel that they’re allowed to cite their raw materials, and reuse doesn’t make the work lesser-- but don’t try to use the courts to force people to try to remember and track where they saw something when they just want to create, or it creates a hostile environment.
That conundrum already exists with the current system, though.
It’s not an easy system but it doesn’t seem any more arduous to say “you can copy X for a fee” vs “you can’t copy X at all.”
It’s easier just to price in the fee than having to shut down or retool a project.
Aren’t there already pretty specific laws about what amount of a work can be copied before it’s plagiarism?
Not that I’m aware of.
That last sentence is it. IP laws are outrageous monstrosities these days, with folks like Disney getting 100-year long exclusive IP rights to characters and stuff like the DMCA.
But how much do IP laws actually protect the little guy? When a large corporation can bankrupt me by prolonging litigation until I have nothing left, what leverage do I really have?
There are certainly cases where small creators and inventors were able to overcome this disadvantage, but I suspect that they are the tiny minority, celebrated when they do achieve it.
The imbalance against giant corporations isn’t anything to sneeze at, but there are just as many (probably more) small time companies breaking copyright law and hoping nobody notices. For example, stealing artwork to print on cheap crap that you sell below what the creator is selling them for. If they’re in an area that recognizes that copyright then they’re going to lose every time, and they’re not going to have enough money to drag it out. After that happens artists can recover all the earnings that were made with their work. Without that the artist is just fucked.
“Whatabout…”
The reason IP exists isn’t a whatabout, it kinda sounds like you just don’t want to hear about anyone other than giant corporations benefitting from it.
For as much as they are abused, “IP laws” protect small and individual inventors, writers, composers, etc.
Do they? Or do they protect the huge companies that those people have to assign their IP to?
With no patent, copyright or trademark protections the billionaires will own or bury everything.
Trademark protection - yes, it’s very important. Same as authorship vs copyright, copyright might be harmful, but authorship is necessary to protect.
If “delete all IP law” means that you can’t be sued for using something copyrighted, like, say, openly using Opera Presto leaked sources or making a Nintendo console emulator, and that you can’t be sued for rounded corners, and that you can’t be sued for using some proprietary hardware interface without royalties, - then it may be good.
But I think these people are after copyleft.
Still, interesting, how many different people are today implementing what was being discussed in very vague strokes 10-15 years ago. All of it at the same time, breaking everything. I mean really all of it. Signal is one of the common ideas, Musk’s DOGE is another, federation model being alive again is another, and all the ghouls around. A full Brazilian carnival of grotesque ideas. I want my childhood back (Signal is cool, but the rest is not).
… Delete… all… IP law?
So… just literally make all piracy legal, switch all gaming and tv show and movie production/consumption… to an optional donation model?
Fuck it, why not.
I am both an avid pirate and have a degree in econ, wrote papers as an undergrad on how to potentially reform the DMCA… and uh yeah, at this point yeah no one has any fucking idea how any thing works, everyone is an idiot, sure fuck it, blow it all up, why not.
It’s not a surprise that all these techbros who want to steal everything and feed it into their AI machines without paying a single fucking cent to the original creators all the sudden want to get rid of IP. They can lead by example by submitting their IP into the public domain.
Or maybe they’re just massive frauds?
This is of course after they spent decades consolidating power, wealth and influence with those same IP laws, while snuffing out all smaller competitors.
The speed with which Americas tech CEOs have embraced this new oligarchic system is astounding. It’s almost like that was the plan all along. Almost.
I’m cool with it. I think we should require almost everything to be public domain. But I think those personally contributing to the public domain should be recognized, and no one should be allowed to get rich off of it.
You’re cool with it until you realize that they only want to do this to personally gain from it. And guaranteed will protect their own IP, and the IP of every large corporation.
It’s just that you yourself and small businesses will no longer have the benefit of intellectual property. Megacorps can steal whatever they want with impunity since they are the only true holders of intellectual property.
That sounds good on paper until you look at the long history of these people and how everything they do is entirely focused on their own benefit over that of others. They gain something to win here, guaranteed they aren’t going to let themselves lose on anything either.
It’s the same sort of situation as AI regulation. Sam Altman and openai want the United States to crack down and make it extremely difficult to develop new models. Why? So that they don’t have any competition. They already got their foot in the door they want to close the door for anyone else.
This is very likely the same sort of situation.
Kinda feel like they said something like
“I think everyone should have food”
And you responded with
“you want a Walmart on every block in the world?? do you even know the environmental impact that will have? Poor people are really to blame anyways because they’re not voting with their wallets enough”
How an asshole can mess something up is entirely independent of how a proper implementation might not mess up
Edit to say: I think this is what they meant in their comment about (American) capitalist propaganda; You dont realise your implicit bias enforcing that it must be a capitalist implementing it without any external input.
To the rest of the world he’s just an infamous citizen in a dying country, who would never realistically have 1/10th the pull needed to enforce that BS internationally; by starting the conversation at best he’d speed up external implementations.
You really need to read something that isn’t capitalist propaganda.
Removing copyright entirely is a bridge too far.
Just roll it back to a reasonable time limit (I dunno, 7 years?), and categorically reject all further lobbying attempts from Disney and the like.
This is called being a “reactionary.” You don’t want to drastically change the system in ways that’ll make things better for all. You just want to return to a previous status quo you enjoyed.
I’d like to get back to ‘for limited time’. Patents 10 years, no extensions. Copyright, 10 years, no extensions. Trademarks indefinite as long as the owner still has a meaningful business still operating and using the trademark ( this one is tricky to define well).
It’s still a misguided policy aimed at furthering the lie of individualism. Which why we have so many ridiculous true stories of parallel invention, and scientists racing to the patent office to claim full credit.
These people are building on the works of all those who came before. All should benefit from the results. And all should enjoy a basic standard of living, instead of this cut throat first past this finish line system, where all who fall behind will suffer.
I view the patent process as furthering the ability of others to benefit from the results: without patents, the only way to keep clones of your product from immediately appearing on the market is obfuscation and trade secrets. Patents grant a limited monopoly, but at the price of full disclosure. That full disclosure serves a useful social benefit as others can learn and innovate on what was done before. The limited monopoly encourages innovation because it helps people get exclusive rights to sell their work.
There’s a lot of bad patent behavior with patent trolls, etc. The duration of the patents should be relatively short and not extensible. But I think the disclosure aspect of the patent process does further overall innovation.
We can require disclosure without providing a government backed monopoly. Especially when the modern world has corporations enjoying the benefits of the monopoly, at the expense of individuals.
A government stipend to make public art or open source software or literature or whatever sounds pretty great. It’s hard to see how we get there from here. But it’d be great.
France has something like it for artists I think.
Well… Until you get someone like Trump in charge and he decides that the stipend only goes to those that praise him and strips the stipend from anyone critical of him or his ideology.
A great starting point is guaranteeing a basic standard of living for all. No exceptions.
“Delete all IP law” say people who have never created anything of any value to humanity.
