Comment by derefr
5 years ago
> 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).
> More competition can't lead to nastier alternatives
Pre-FDA "patent medicines" beg to differ. Austria's wine industry (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1985_diethylene_glycol_wine_sc...) begs to differ. Those were competitive markets! And they certainly increasingly optimized for something as competition increased. What they increasingly optimized for, though, was the naive experience that made people buy the product (e.g. taste; "feeling good"), at the expense of health/welfare outcomes. It turns out that some poisons taste good, and make your product more popular!
Over the long term, statistically, yes, companies that do bad things in the name of profitability probably get boycotted and die.
In the medium term, though, the people that bought the products die as well. That's a necessary step in that long-term equilibrium. The "state of nature" of a capitalist market is one where companies cut corners until the corners kill people, and then people get mad and get together to kill those particular companies.
This is a dynamic equilibrium though. It's not that you end up with corporations afraid to cut corners. You end up with a constant stream of new corporations forming, going well for a while, cutting corners, killing people, and then being taken apart. It's the reverse of P.T. Barnum's "a sucker is born every minute": an unethical entrepreneur is born every minute, to take advantage of those suckers. On average, the set of corporations in existence at any given moment would be half "one step away from killing people", and half "already killing people but nobody's noticed yet."
And indeed, this is how things were for much of the Victorian era (with cyanide-based paints, nitrocelluloid plastics, and other such already-well-known hazards continuing to be sold on the open market) up through to the 1950s.
Being humans rather than animals, we have the unique capability (if not often the motivation) to learn an object lesson without having to personally suffer its negative consequences even once. We can see someone else burn their hands on a stove, and then make a rule about not touching stoves, such that nobody ever has to actually burn their hand on a stove to personally re-derive that rule again.
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.