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.”
I’m fully in favour of abolishing IP law for everyone, ideally globally.
Public domain everything.
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.”
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?
Ok, and not every time a person wins there’s a headline either, this is a moot point.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Weird. You called me evil when I suggested it as the correct way to pay creatives and everyone else. Maybe your problem with my argument is your own reading comprehension.
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
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If they didn’t patent it, that technology never would have existed in the first place for you to steal from.
100% agreed on that account.
“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…
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.
https://study.com/learn/lesson/eli-whitney-interchangeable-parts-overview-history-importance.html#%3A~%3Atext=While+historians+do+not+credit%2Cparts+replaced+by+unskilled+workers.
Outside of art, machine made parts are far more perfect than hand crafted.
People also didn’t make stuff before patents existed. That’s why they exist.
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.
What didn’t they make?
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.
So you are assuming they didn’t make them for reasons that didn’t exist at the time.
Ok.
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.
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?
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.
But…they don’t. And if you removed IP law then they still wouldn’t…
this isn’t the only option but it’s recent and relevant
I’ll have to look at that later.
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.
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.
Which is paid for most often by proprietary companies. Take a look at the OBS webpage.
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.
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?
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.
…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.
Nor the more substantial argument I was making, it seems, since you didn’t seem to take the time to understand it. Fair enough, I can respect the ability to walk away from a discussion you don’t have a counter-argument for even if you don’t seem to have the ability to admit it.
Nobody does anything anymore and we’ll all just die. Gotcha.
Yes that’s totally what I said.
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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.
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…?