Comment by simpaticoder
6 hours ago
The real story here is that IP ownership is capital-intensive when it shouldn't be. Open-source and community-led IP contributions are grossly under-protected because of this, and those with capital become unopposed predators. This is a special-case of the more general observation that the justice system is capital-intensive when it shouldn't be. The answer is something you very rarely hear: the US (especially) needs justice system reform with an eye toward making actions take 100x less time and 100x less money, approaching free for consumer and IP actions. Given the advent of computers, the internet, video conferencing, it is outrageous how much of the current system requires physical paper, physical presence in a courtroom. It is outrageous how the slowness and cost of the system itself is used by the wealthy to bully the poor.
IP is just too strong. The terms are ridiculously long (especially for copyright), there are multiple workarounds for "fair use", such as DMCA, and patents on simple concepts like linked lists are not laughed out of the room.
All of this stuff needs to be weakened (and shortened). Part of the reason Chinese companies are able to iterate quickly on technology like 3d printers or drones is that it's possible to simply ignore this stifling IP regime until you actually need to start selling internationally.
It's telling that the article specifically calls out patents originating in China. It seems ridiculous to treat these as serious filings and not shredder fodder when the originating country happily allows their local industry to ignore western patents. The asymmetry here leads to obvious advantages for Chinese companies.
The more I look into it, the more I'm convinced that current state of IP law is the rot at the core of western worlds technological stagnation. The rise of monopolistic megacorps, lack of independent innovation and enshittifcation can pretty much be traced back to the wide free market violating reach of current IP law.
This article just highlights it and shows how China weaponized this weakness of the west and is successfuly using it to pull ahead.
Meanwhile our own innovative companies and individuals get ground into dust by the boot of patent lawyers wielded by megacorps.
It's telling that before the Patent system the solution was secretive guilds that jealously (sometimes lethally) guarded their secrets to avoid competition. This was obviously terrible since it greatly slowed down innovation.
I'm not sure what the correct solution is to this problem. We want to avoid anything that causes a return of the guild system, but at the same time we don't want small inventors steamrolled by large corporations.
That said, I think corporations should be much more limited in their Patent powers. In fact it's questionable how much value society gets out of large corporation patents. If another large corporation "steals" the idea and capitalizes on it first that is their own fault. The only people who profit are the lawyers.
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>Meanwhile our own innvative companies and individuals get ground into dust by the boot of patent lawyers wielded by megacorps.
So they sell a large part of their company to capital who can afford to acquire and defend IP. In this happy case they are only ground into 90% dust.
Yeah, people complain about AI companies "stealing" IP, but it's becoming accepted, both by judges and the US president [1].
I'm not sure weakening of IP law is such a bad thing after all. Let's just hope the weakening trickles down from AI juggernauts to smaller fish.
[1] https://torrentfreak.com/president-trump-its-not-doable-for-...
To be fair, in the States, you can own a small business, come up with a good idea, and someone can just copy it and compete against you regardless if it's copyright infringement or not. And that's in the context of a domestic legal issue.
You have to be able to defend your intellectual property, and that's expensive, which is the parent comment's point.
I mean, imagine you, AlexandrB, come up with some good idea, start working on the implementation and delivery of that good or service, and someone just... copies it. Or copies it and releases it for free.
Should... we just not care about that? Because the idea of not having any intellectual property protections whatsoever is even more absurd than having them.
It requires incredible, statistically insurmountable effort, attention, and revenue to create even a two-person, full-time, sustainable business. More so in software and hardware where everyone is releasing open source software, everyone wants everything to be free, no one wants to pay for anything, and hardware designs are regularly stolen.
Forget that dude, you can make more money selling lemonade in your neighborhood.
A kid selling candy bars for school fundraisers has a better chance than someone creating a product in our field and taking it to market.
No, we definitely need intellectual property protection and it should be essentially free to defend yourself as an individual or small business.
The deal is supposed to be that there's a trade:
* You are given an exclusive right to exploit a work, for enough time to make it worth your while.
* Everyone gets the work in the end.
We're not succeeding at this. The terms are a little too short for biotech. They're wayyyyy too long for software. The barriers to entry to get and enforce IP are too large for small businesses. But it's also too easy to figure it all out and generate tons of fake IPR to harass real business with.
People who aren't rich already don't have any intellectual property anyway. The idea of nobody having them seems inherently more suitable insofar as someone could as it stands just ignore your property anyway with the primary difference in this hypothetical reality that instead of being able to copy you AND shut you down they just copy you.
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It's not a binary too string / too weak. It's that _copyright_:
- protects the wrong entities (corporations instead of individuals who did the real work) - IP should be collectively owned by the people who created it and selling it should be illegal,
- is too long, yes
- DMCA can be used to harass without actually owning the IP and there are no penalties
- the fair use exception can be used to allow clear cases of plagiarism where you mechanically transform an original work with barely any human input in such a way that it's hard or impossible to prove it was based on the original.
As for _patents_, they should simply require proof of work - basically they should only be for recovering research costs (with profit), not holding everyone hostage. They should also be subject to experts in the field verifying they are not trivial and how much work they would take to replicate.
And obviously China is a global parasite. We should apply to them the same standards they apply to us - none.
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More generally incentives matter. If trying something has (near) 0 cost but high reward, abusive actors will keep trying despite most of their attempts failing. Anybody who understands that incentives shape the world will immediately identify this pattern (any gamedevs here?). There must be punishments for provably bogus attempts to use IP - both copyright and patents.
> - protects the wrong entities (corporations instead of individuals who did the real work) - IP should be collectively owned by the people who created it and selling it should be illegal,
That's like say a band getting an advance to record their album should be illegal. Without access to people with money now a lot of it wouldn't get made. And if they are fronting the money before it exists, then they are taking risk so they need a risk premium.
The other results is art made by those who don't need it, purely made by amateurs, grant funded art, or socially funded art.
All are workable, but with their own tradeoffs.
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>And obviously China is a global parasite.
Britain said the same things about the US in the early days. We told them to f* off about copyright/patent stuff quite often.
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Patents just aren't necessary. When something is in the "air", sooner or later it will be invented because it will be obvious in the state of the art.
There's no need to grant monopoly privileges. Rather, I favor market governed subsidies and grants for innovators to recoup the cost of their effort. The government will play a role in setting up the market and running it. This will be more democratic as people will have a voice to reward inventors for their efforts.
I expect this to be complimentary to innovations that will already arise.
> Patents just aren't necessary.
One argument is that patents encourage innovation. The promise of a patent and the rewards to be gained act as a motivating force for ideas. Supposedly.
> the US (especially) needs justice system reform with an eye toward making actions take 100x less time and 100x less money, approaching free for consumer and IP actions
While not addressing the situation in the same way, here's my knee-jerk idea for defense against patent trolls:
"If you want to sue a person or an organization, you must pay the legal fees for the defendant, in an amount equal or greater to the amount of money being spent by the plaintiff on legal matters pertaining to the case."
So a small business would get full funding for defense, but it would cost them double to sue someone else. I'd say that's an excellent trade-off. This would dissuade not just patent trolls but any lawsuit where money would be the determining factor for victory.
The Achilles' heel would be enforcement, leading to a new subcategory of legal efforts to ensure compliance. But there's an opportunity for a net reduction in legal action.
The driver of cost isn't paper or physical presence -- I'd be willing to print a few pages and show up downtown in my city where the court is much more if not for the real costs. It often costs hundreds of dollars to file in court (even for small claims in some states), which is a problem because misconduct under a few hundrs dollars is common. It is also almost always useful and often requied (such as when an LLC is a party) to hire lawyers. The law is so complex, and the court procedures too, that we need highly trained professionals to effectively represent people.
The model of paying these professionals from the salary of the average person who themself probably makes way less or from a cash strapped startup doesn't add up. Therefore, to fix the issue we either need to pay lawyers less, pay them from some other source (I'd like to see that in a court case either party can spend any amount on representation, but they must pay into a common pot that's split in half for the opposing party to hire their own representation of a similiar quality), or make them less needed (i.e., simplify and document law and court procedures then legalize pro se representation in all cases including LLCs such that anyone can effectively argue in court).
That would bring down the price of patent spam even more. The problem is the cost of protection relative to the cost of attack, you can't do much.
But it would also make patent spamming much less valuable and arguably more expensive for the spammer. If you spam patents and get one issued for something that isn't novel and/or already has prior art, everyone can fight it and it quickly gets its metal tested in court.
I imagine a fine for egregious patents could also be implemented. If your patent is demonstrated in court to lack standing, the civil liability is on you, not the patent office.
The hard reality is that nobody actually knows a priori what innovation is. Or how much an innovation is actually worth. If you removed patents that would pretty easily and trivially stop the spam.
The first problem is that what's written in the law and what actually happens are pushed apart by the ridiculous costs of using courts. If fixing that such that courts are fully accessible to anyone without worrying about the cost doesn't produce the desired outcome, then one should look to legislate that outcome. Bad legislation is thus the second problem.
It would allow anyone to patent spam though, that could be a good thing.
How? Compare to email spam where the cost is zero. Is that in any way better than a world where it takes substantial capital to send email spam?
Lower cost = more patents = more patent trolls = less innovation.
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What if you have to pay a fee for each patent application that gets rejected?
Then companies with deep pockets can reapply, while individuals who get rejected due to mistakes won't be able to afford it.
The problem is the size difference between the applicants, and just saying "charge by their income" wouldn't help when a shell company with no income applies.
Correct, bad actors would use this.
> The real story here is that IP ownership is capital-intensive when it shouldn't be
The backbone of the US economy are services and software, which depend a lot on IP. Deliberately or not, "low-value" American manufacturing was sacrificed for these high-margin industries. AFAICT, it's impossible to turn back the clock on manufacturing without disadvantaging US software/services both on the legal regime and trade fronts
partial disagree, I think the issue is how the patent office abdicated any but the most superficial effort to validate patents onto the court system
It would be good if the difficulty of getting patents would go up by a factor of 10. To get less of them in volume, and less bullshit ones. Should also throw out a bunch of the existing bad ones.
Actually AFIAK most of the US has moved to electronic filing, but that has actually made things more expensive. Typically courts hire out the electronic filing part. The hired companies typically collect money from both the state/county and the end user. Larger court systems like LA, NYC, and Cook are big enough to force concessions, or even fund new companies, but others have to buy into one system or another.
It would be great if a bunch of courts could band together to setup a shared open source solution, but courts at the state level are pretty fractious. And the legal system is both pretty slow and pretty reluctant to change.
Time limits on cases would really help.
Ie. Each side has 15 minutes to explain their side, then the jury has 15 minutes to discuss, then a vote is taken and a decision made.
Sure, some more subtle outcomes would be 'wrong' - but does it actually matter?
Usually we need evidence to make a decent decision. It's not debate club.
Sure - but you better fit the evidence inside 15 mins too
> used by the wealthy to bully the poor
Working as intended then
>the US (especially) needs justice system reform with an eye toward making actions take 100x less time and 100x less money, approaching free for consumer and IP actions.
And why would those in power do that, when the justice system as it is exists to serve their interests?
No. The real story is China weaponizing the global IP system in an imbalanced manner.
IP ownership is not inherently capital-intensive in the US.
One solution may be to move from an adversarial system to more of an inquisitorial one. This mostly removes the need for lawyers.
Maybe the patent system isn’t “broken” - maybe it’s working exactly as intended: a modern master–slave dynamic where the rich can’t own people, so they own ideas and rent them back. Patents were sold as protection for inventors, but in practice they’re corporate minefields. Filing costs and enforcement make them useless to anyone without deep pockets, while big players hoard them to block competition, extract rent, and stall entire fields. With today’s tech, knowledge could be replicated and shared at near-zero cost, but the system manufactures artificial scarcity. A literal protection racket.
For what it's worth, I run a company in the space --
I 100% agree with you and luckily I think with AI this will rapidly change. The USPTO is bringing on as many AI tools as possible, as fast as they can. Similarly, we've built a product that can invalidate patents at scale, conduct prior art searches in 15 minutes what used to take weeks and thousands of dollars --
https://search.ipcopilot.ai/
We and others in the space are rapidly gaining traction, so I suspect it's only a matter of time. I should also mention there are whole networks out there battling patent trolls (LOT Network) and others working on open source, etc.
>Given the advent of computers, the internet, video conferencing, it is outrageous how much of the current system requires physical paper, physical presence in a courtroom. It is outrageous how the slowness and cost of the system itself is used by the wealthy to bully the poor.
You're leaving out the part that there are a limited number of judges, and to be a good judge requires a LOT of education, a LOT of experience, and a LOT of time (in other words it's expensive to become a good judge and they need to be compensated to reflect the cost of becoming one).
Computers and Zoom don't change the fact our options are either: Put thousands of new unqualified people into positions of power (judges) Or continue with the current system where getting into a court is slow and expensive.
Unless you're planning on building an entirely new court system removed from the current one specifically for IP. To which I say: good luck, because it'll be a massive expansion of government that doesn't include lining the pockets of our current little dictator or his supporters so we'll hear about how we need to shrink government and reduce the debt.
Presence in the courtroom is kind of a red herring. It's uncommon for cases to get that far.
The real costs come from the US legal system being originally designed by and for agrarian villages of Saxons arguing with each other about who stole whose sheep, with the process handled in a more-or-less ad-hoc manner by village leaders for whom it's mostly a side responsibility, and the whole mess serving double duty as a source of community entertainment not unlike modern reality television.
A lot has changed over the past 1,000 years, but at it's core it's still a system that puts an incredible amount of focus on people arguing about Every. Single. Damned. Thing. No. Matter. How. Trivial. The really expensive parts of a lawsuit are the parts that create the most opportunity for this kind of bickering. Which is typically the parts that don't happen inside a courtroom. For example there's the discovery phase, which all by itself is so unusually complicated and expensive that it's spawned an entire multibillion dollar industry that basically only exists in English-speaking countries. And all the ancillary litigation over nitpicky procedural matters. And maybe other things, but those are the two that are the worst for being inherently expensive, easy to weaponize, and peculiarly Anglo-Saxon.
This would imply that civil law systems don't suffer from these problems, but they do. I don't think common law is to blame for the complexity of the justice system.
I'd vote for you
The fact that IP protection is expensive is essentially its defining feature. One way to think of "intellectual property" is precisely as a weird proof-of-work, since you are trying to simulate the features of physical property for abstract entities that by default behave in the exact opposite fashion.
This is the frustrating thing about getting into an argument about how "IP isn't real property" and then having the other side roll their eyes at you like you are some naive ideologue. They're missing the point of what it means for IP to not be "real property". The actual point is understanding that you are, and will be, swimming against the current of the fundamentals of these technologies forever. It is very very difficult to make a digital book or movie that can't be copied. So difficult in fact, that it we've had to keep pushing the problem lower and lower into the system, with DRM protections at the hardware level. This is essentially expensive, not just from a capital perspective, but from a "focus and complexity" burden perspective as well. Then realize that even after putting this entire system in place, an entire trade block could arbitrarily decide to stop enforcing copyright, AKA, stop fueling the expensive apparatus that is is holding up the "physical property" facade for "intellectual property". This was actually being floated as a retaliation tactic during the peak of the tariff dispute with Canada[1]. And in fact we don't even need to go that far, it has of course always been the case that patents vary in practical enforceability country to country, and copyrights (despite an attempt to unify the rules globally) are also different country to country (the earliest TinTin is public domain in the US but not in the EU).
Usually at this point someone says "It's expensive to defend physical property too! See what happens if another country takes your cruise liner". But that's precisely the point, the difficulty scales with the item. I don't regularly have my chairs sitting in Russia for them to be nationalized. The entities that have large physical footprints are also the ones most likely to have the resources defend that property. This is simply not the case with "intellectual property," which has zero natural friction in spreading across the world, and certainly doesn't correlate with the "owner's" ability to "defend" it. This is due to the fundamental contradiction that "intellectual property" tries to establish: it wants all the the zero unit-cost and distribution benefits of "ethereal goods," with all the asset-like benefits of physical goods. It wants it both ways.
Notice that all the details always get brushed away, we assume we have great patent clerks making sure only "novel inventions" get awarded patents. It assumes that patent clerks are even capable of understanding the patent in question (they're not, the vast majority are new grads [2]). We assume the copyright office is property staffed (it isn't [3]) We assume the intricacies of abstract items like "APIs" can be property understood by both judge and jury in order to reach the right verdict in the theoretically obvious cases (also turns out that most people are not familiar with these concepts).
How could this not be expensive? You essentially need to create "property lore" in every case that is tried. Any wish for the system to be faster would necessarily also mean less correct verdicts. There's no magic "intellectual property dude" that could resolve all this stuff. Copyright law says that math can't be copyrighted, yet we can copyright code. Patent law says life can't be patented, yet our system plainly allows copyrighting bacteria. Why? Because a lawyer held of a tube of clear liquid and said "does this seem like life to you?" The landmark Supreme Court case was decided 5-4 [4], and all of a sudden a thing that should obviously not be copyrightable by anyone that understands the science was decided it was. There's no "hidden true rules" that if just followed, would make this system efficient. It is, by design, a system that makes things up as it goes along.
As mentioned in other comments, at best you could just flip burden to the other party, which doesn't make the system less expensive, it just shifts the default party that has to initially burden the cost. Arguably this is basically what we have with patents. Patents are incredibly "inventor friendly". You can get your perpetual motion machine patented easy-peasy. In fact, there is so much "respect" for "ideas" as "real things", that you can patent things you never made and have no intention of making. You can then sue companies that actually make the thing you "described first". Every case is a new baby being presented to King Solomon to cut in half.
In other words, an inexpensive system would at minimum require universal understanding and agreement on supremely intricate technical details of every field it aims to serve, which isn't just implausible, it is arguably impossible by definition since the whole point of intellectual property is to cover the newest developments in the field.
1. https://www.cigionline.org/articles/canada-can-fight-us-tari...
2. https://tolmasky.com/2012/08/29/patents-and-juries/
3. https://www.wired.com/story/us-copyright-office-chaos-doge/
4. https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/447/303/
While I don't entirely disagree with you. You have to understand why the courts exist at all. To govern working class citizens. Laws are written by the powerful and wealthy - always has been - to control the working class (everyone else).
You're freedom is an illusion. A social contract agreed upon by you following certain rules. Those rules, written by the wealthy, don't apply to the wealthy. In a just society they would be, but we have ceased to be a just society for the last 50 years. Technology isn't going to solve this without becoming that AI overlord everyone is scared of. Court systems are designed to prevent working class from becoming wealthy and to protect the wealthy and their assets from the working class. (violent crimes aside)
> In a just society they would be, but we have ceased to be a just society for the last 50 years.
When did we start being a just society would you say? WWI? The Civil Rights Act? Unless you really stretch things, saying that justice declined in the last 50 years - even if true - means that justice "peaked" for a short period of maybe a generation. I suspect if you actually lived in that era[1] you wouldn't think that though so this whole framing is based on false nostalgia for a time you never experienced.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism
> When did we start being a just society would you say?
I think most historians would agree that it started with the signing of the Magna Carta in 1215.
It was a very small start, it only protected nobles from the king, but it's generally considered to be the start.
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Just going off my own experience. While violent crime has diminished, other crimes are going on in plain sight with prudence from the courts. Because privatized prisons are a thing in the US, they need product... You'll be charged $4/day - $80/day while you're there. I remember when "debtor's prison" was illegal. Now it's not. So you can brush it under a rug, claim things are better, claim we are more just than we used to be, but I never claimed that we ever were 100% just. Only that we used to be more just than we are today.
https://www.rutgers.edu/news/states-unfairly-burdening-incar...
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/amer...
https://news.gallup.com/poll/653897/americans-pass-judgment-...
https://judicature.duke.edu/articles/the-withering-of-public...
https://www.idea.int/blog/how-independent-us-supreme-court-u...
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Probably 50s-70s? The golden age of capitalism oddly enough. Among other things taxation maintained a more even wealth distribution during this time in many western countries. Combined with a record large generation that had few children and parents that dies in wars (almost everyone working), this lead to a surplus. When there is a surplus the overlords are generous. Now that generation is old and dependent on the handful of children they had. There is no longer a surplus. There is hope that the technologies we are creating could bring enough productivity gains to return to surplus conditions, but the population decline that will have to overcome is extreme. IP laws aren't encouraging these productivity gains like we need them to, so we should ignore them. The west deciding to ignore chinese IP won't be the thing that starts the war, and it isn't like china ever respected the IP of the west. We should be buying up all the tooling we need to painfully bootstrap automated manufacturing ourselves and reverse engineer it.
"Justice" is not a scalar. It is a matrix, at best.
In some parts of America, and in some aspects, "justice" was still clearly increasing up until the second Trump presidency. This is especially true for the treatment of various marginalized groups (especially queer people, where it's quite obvious that "justice" for them increased markedly with the Obergefell v Hodges decision in 2015, and continued to improve in many ways after that).
In other areas and ways, it peaked before 9/11 and has dropped a great deal since.
In still others, it's been on a long slow decline since some time in the latter part of the 20th century.
And this is part of why some people are so angry these days: they see "justice" decreasing for them, while it increases for other people—including some of the people they've always considered to be beneath them—and they wrongly conclude that it's a zero-sum game, and they need to reduce justice for those other people in order to bring it back for them.
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Arguably justice in general started declining with the invention of the typewriter, and injustice accelerated with the invention of the word processor and will get far worse with LLMs. The cost and time of litigation scales like n^2 where n is the textual length of the law. Personally I'd like to require that laws be written out by hand by the lawmaker(s) proposing them (NOT their staffers), and read aloud by them before a vote.
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That’s an exaggeration. As a famous example, Musk believed that laws didn’t apply to him and he ended up having to buy Twitter anyway after he tried to back out.
Corporate law is a thing. There are huge, consequential lawsuits between giant corporations.
> As a famous example, Musk believed that laws didn’t apply to him and he ended up having to buy Twitter anyway after he tried to back out.
Yeah and nevermind everything else. Thanks for the laugh.
Strawman
> we have ceased to be a just society for the last 50 years
How could I guess you are not black?
That's a whole other can of worms... For them, it's been more like 500 years. The user danaris said it best I think, it depends on who you are. While some groups have had their justice increased, others have seen theirs decrease.
In the US, laws protect the franchise. The franchise may have wealth but at least at this point in history we have as a nation, extended it to everyone.
If the laws protect the wealthy then perhaps your cynical view misses the fact that there is more wealth held by the average US citizen than that of any other nation on earth. Are we trending the correct direction? No. But that’s not the result of injustice, it’s the result of an economic system that prioritizes wealth extraction.
Wealth and power aren’t entirely the same.
"Democracy" boils down to choosing one point ("candidate") in a highly dimensional space to express your entire preference (actually a high dimensional vector). This is _obviously_ stupid.
You can see the effects in how people love simplifying things into the left/right spectrum, sometimes adding a second axis for conservative/liberal. Because if you do PCA, those are probably the most important factors for many people.
But they fail to generalize this realization to openly discuss the other "less critical" dimensions.
It's a failure of the education system and it perpetuates learned helplessness.
> You have to understand why the courts exist at all. To govern working class citizens. Laws are written by the powerful and wealthy - always has been - to control the working class (everyone else).
It's amazing that after so many failures people are still preaching communism.
You'd have a leg to stand on if you could produce a single communist society which worked for the working class instead of the communist elites.
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> Those rules, written by the wealthy, don't apply to the wealthy
How do you think the wealthy resolve dusputes among themselves? You obviously have never lived in a truly lawless society