Comment by traverseda
5 years ago
>That's mean, but you'll just have to live with that
I mean I know we're all on board with the idea of intellectual property actually being a thing now, but surely there are limits? I've seen people take the hard-line stance that if something is your property you should be able to dictate exactly under what situation it can be used, but there have to be limits to IP holders rights on some level, and I feel like reverse engineering a file format is a pretty reasonable place to draw that line.
> we're all on board with the idea of intellectual property actually being a thing now
We most certainly are not. I personally believe that intellectual property as a whole doesn't make sense in the 21st century and should be abolished.
> there have to be limits to IP holders rights on some level
There are. The laws generally recognize fair use and reverse engineering for interoperability.
> I feel like reverse engineering a file format is a pretty reasonable place to draw that line
Absolutely. Unfortunately, in the US it seems corporations can force people to give up their rights by making them agree to it. Therefore, "you must not reverse engineer our software" is a standard clause in every contract and it's not negotiable.
I'd be more on board with it if it were taxed like other property. That patent's worth $1B, you say? Better let Accounting know. Conversely: you're suing for $1B for a patent violation but you only paid taxes on it being worth $300? $300 max it is, then.
> taxed like other property.
Most property owned by companies is not taxed.
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Yep, it's a great idea - treat intellectual property like any other property. However, corporate lobbyists would shoot this sort of legislation down, so i don't have any faith that it can ever come to fruition.
> we're all on board with the idea of intellectual property actually being a thing now
Admittedly I was being a bit facetious about that.
> I personally believe that intellectual property as a whole doesn't make sense in the 21st century and should be abolished.
Do you believe that models should have no right to be compensated if some corporation takes a picture of them off the internet and uses it in their own ad campaign?
Do you believe that McDonalds should be free to make and sell happy-meal toys of whatever kids’ movie is hot lately, even using the logo of the movie in their advertising, with no obligation to compensate the people who made the movie?
Do you believe that if an inventor comes up with a new system for drug delivery and tries to sell it to some pharma company—but the pharma company turns around and does industrial espionage to get access to the technique themselves—then the pharma company should be able to just walk away with the new technology, with the inventor left with no legal recourse?
Those are all “intellectual property”, too. IP isn’t just software patents and overextended copyright terms. A world truly without any IP law wouldn’t be a utopia for innovation; it’d be a dystopia of every middleman having the legal right to produce and sell their own fakes of everything, to the point that brands cannot exist.
It’d be a world where every store, even the brick-and-mortar ones, even the ones selling things like drugs, work like shopping on Wish/AliExpress.
It’d be a world where e.g. the Coca-Cola company makes fake Pepsi products that looks exactly like the ones PepsiCo makes but which taste much worse, and puts them in stores beside the real PepsiCo products, to get Pepsi drinkers to buy those, taste them, think “Pepsi isn’t the same any more”, and switch.
It’d certainly be a world where every drug is just a generic, because you couldn’t maintain a drug brand in the face of identical dups—but it’d also be a world where even the generic store brands of drugs could be switched out at every step of the supply chain for cheaper/nastier alternatives, with no legal consequence (as long as the resulting drugs still met FDA standards.) Without IP law, there’d be no legal recourse to the suppliers who did that. It’d be, at best, a contractual dispute; and so would effectively always come down to the relative depth-of-pockets of the buyer vs. the elements of their supply chain.
Is that a world you want to live in?
Certainly, we need IP reform. But not even the most hardcore libertarian really wants to live in a world where every kind of IP right is unilaterally abolished. Having global capitalism entirely unfettered by IP rights, is like having a car entirely unfettered by brakes. You don’t get a faster car; you get a car that crashes into trees a lot.
More competition can't lead to nastier alternatives, more competition leads to both higher quality and lower prices. And power of copyright that protects pretty much just the wealth of rich corporations doesn't simply disappear. Taking it away creates new power for everyone else equally distributed, leading to more competition, more independent creators and small companies, not more rich corporations, as those won't be able to concentrate wealth without it.
The world you are describing is impossible and part of it already exists precisely because of the power of copyright, not the other way around (models are already screwed and have to give up rights to corporations, they certainly aren't powerful enough to monitor where their images are used, inventors too have to give up rights to corporations and do get their stuff stolen, remember how Google did that? And it was just one public occurrence).
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I apologize but I cannot continue this thread. I've been warned before about ideological discussion on HN so I shall limit myself to expressing my opinion without elaborating.
I didn't take "you'll just have to live with that" as a claim that the user couldn't reverse engineer it. It simply means that they've made it harder for the user to do so, and so the user has to live with it being harder.
this.
> I know we're all on board with the idea of intellectual property actually being a thing now
I don't know that that's true at all! I'd say the pendulum is swinging in the opposite direction.
>we're all on board with the idea of intellectual property actually being a thing now
No. Intellectual property is not genuine property. It is a state granted monopoly and is antithetical to free market principles.
"Intellectual property" isn't a thing, "Intellectual Property Rights" are. They're not "antithetical to free market principles" if you accept that the "free market" requires regulation and that there are benefits to society by the cost of temporarily restricting free use with the subsequent benefit of ideas and expressions not being lost on the death/loss/bankruptcy etc of the IPR holder.
IPRs are (in general) things that are protected by law and open to licensing and civil suits for damages if used outside those laws and licenses:
* Trade Secrets and NDAs
* Copyrights
* Patents
* Trademarks
NDAs, etc. are contract law. Contracts need to be entered in without duress as they would be felonies otherwise. The others are societal contracts which operate much more akin to taxes from a philosophical point of view. But calling today's copyright law a temporary restriction is cynical at best.
Every government protection starts as a temporary relief. Then the corporations that benefit from those regulations use the extra revenue to lobby for more exclusively beneficial regulations that harm their competitors. The result is copyrights that last for infinity minus one years, infantile industries requiring temporary protections yet never leaving infancy, and regulatory boards staffed by CEOs from the industries they regulate. Copyright law, much like communism and eating ice cream for dinner every night, sounds good only in isolation without a historical perspective.
They aren't saying you have to live with the legal restriction, but rather the technical restriction of having to reverse engineer it without the headers
I think the limit is when they are using their IP to prevent you from owning your own data.
Even when a person is on board with intellectual property rights, there is still a distinction between the vendor created program and the user created data. Encoding the data in an undocumented or obfuscated file format may not exert legal rights over that data, but it effectively does so.
I can only see three reasons why someone would support intellectual property rights with respect to file formats: they believe the manipulation of data done by software implies a transfer of ownership of the data, at least in its modified form; they are making a cynical grab for control over the data; or they are incredibly naive.
(There are border cases, such as novel compression schemes, where how the data is stored is the product. That does not really matter when someone is using a file format as a simple container for data. If a file format is truly a border case, there should also be ample forewarning to the end user.)