Comment by AlexandrB
7 hours ago
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.
(Repeating for umpteenth time:) I wish patent fees were exponential. Pay $10 the first year, $40 the second year, $160 the third year,.. $10,485,760 the tenth year, etc. The patent expires and goes to public domain the first year when the fee has not been not paid.
This way there'd be enough time to commercialize an invention for basically peanuts, so the small guy won't be dissuaded from doing so. OTOH holding on a patent for a very long time would only be possible if it brings gobs of money, end even so, only for a reasonably limited time, because on 15th year the fee would be $10,737,418,240.
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I feel like patents are nowadays only used for things that would be easy to reverse-engineer or must be made public anyway. You can't recreate any modern technology by looking at patents, from semiconductor manufacturing to food processing.
So if patents have lost their original purpose, I don't see any value left in perpetuating the system.
I think relying on trade secrets for many things would actually be an improvement over what we have now.
You could still keep your recipe secret, but someone else could come up with something similar with no risk.
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“ In fact it's questionable how much value society gets out of large corporation patents”
I think it’s overwhelmingly negative. They are killing innovation by small players and don’t produce much innovation compared to their size.
Was really so (specifically “lethal”? Do you have sources?
I know trade secret was much more important. Also the spirit of patents is to allow development by making all public.
But do they?! I’m tired of trying to extract useful information off patents, they are empty of content and full of BS is laywer language. Real important details are kept secret, as long as possible.
The current system is de facto not working properly. I’m not saying is the worst, or I have better ideas, but is clear that the system is being heavily abused in all corners.
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I mean, with limiting the allowed use of force to guard secrets, we are probably nowhere near as at risk for the worst of the past? As you said, the competition to guard secrets could be quite severe, and they were not exactly good at knowing actual leaks of their secrets versus someone else independently arriving at them.
That is, I think having the assumption of independent discovery would go a long way to preventing abuse.
I could see some hazard that small shops can't protect their secrets from partner manufacturers and such. But that is exactly where we are with a lot of stuff today?
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> it's questionable how much value society gets out of large corporations
ftfy
It ain't just patents
>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.
Nowadays HFT technology is extremely competitive, with firms investing tens of millions in custom harder to achieve nanosecond latency improvements, but all this has happened entirely without patents. As an industry HFT is way less monopolised than tech, suggesting trade secrets alone are enough to achieve growth and competition.
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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.
Maybe the real problem is that easy low-hanging-fruit inventions attainable by individuals in the garage are long gone, and are now so capital intensive that it doesn't make sense to keep the system in hopes of protecting this fictional small inventor.
Depending on what your your personal net worth percentile threshold is for the word "rich," there are tons of open source software authors who own intellectual property, release it under permissive licenses, and are not rich.
Intellectual property isn't some sort of elite, elusive thing. Anyone can make it.
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.
You could have a system that limits sale of IP to clearly defined capitalization, I.E. instead of "You own this IP for 20 years and get x% of profits in return for funding/publishing and giving my y% of profits" it could be "In return for funding/publishing in the next 5 years, you get x% of profits and I get y% of profits, but I still own my IP and your rights expire after a short period of not publishing.
AFAIK that's actually standard for writers: publishers usually license the IP for a period for a prescribed royalty blend and for publishing, and after a certain amount of time or if they don't publish the rights revert, and international/audio/digital rights are negotiated separately.
There's an argument for "What if I don't want to deal with capitalizing on this whatsoever and just want to sell it for a cash payment now because I literally don't want that to be my job," but even then there should probably be a minimum royalty along with the lump sum to protect against exploitation.
>That's like say a band getting an advance to record their album should be illegal.
It should.
>Without access to people with money now a lot of it wouldn't get made.
So be it.
>The other results is art made by those who don't need it, purely made by amateurs, grant funded art, or socially funded art.
Sounds amazing.
We don't need to go with the default vanilla options that are passed as inevitable...
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The other replies are good.
The general principle is inverting who has power. It should always be with people doing real positive-sum work, not those with money whose primary business of redistributing money and taking a cut.
If they are allowed to ask for something, they will and because they have more power, they are able to pressure people into unfavorable deals. They don't need your band, there's plenty of others who will take the deal. But you need their money or someone else's but that somebody else will offer similar terms, unless those exploitative terms are illegal because people united against parasitism.
>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.
Britain was also putting into place laws/regulations/policies requiring that the U.S. purchase from British manufacturers rather than developing native production --- there's a reason why the first printing press in North America was in Mexico.
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Copyright/patents/laws are just tools. They can be used for both good and evil.
The early US had pro-social goals such as democracy or freedom. And yes, they used slaves because there are no good guys in history or politics, there's various shades of bad.
Current China has anti-social goals such as total control of the population through technological means and expansion by conquest - see them harassing the legitimate government of all of Chine in Taiwan constantly with the military or trying to sink Philipino fishing boats with their warships (two crashed into each other recently). It is also currently committing genocide through both murder and sterilization.
So yeah, I am totally for considering them a parasite and treating them as such.
I'm really fascinated about heavy downvotes for your post because it makes a lot of sense.
I wonder who the people who show up to defend IP law are in these conversations. Why do it? What's the gain?
Who knows? Votes should be public, otherwise this is an easy way to make opinions less visible without having to provide any justification.
Sometimes very similar comments in favor of protecting producers get upvotes on one post and downvotes on another. I also started seeing a pattern - even if a particular comment ends up downvoted in the end, there's usually a few upvotes first, sometimes with comments, then downvotes quickly to get it negative and there's never any comments justifying it and few if any comments after it gets negative. This indicates downvoting works well to silence the discussion.
Oh, yeah, 5 upvotes and 2 comments, then suddenly 7 downvotes without any replies. Totally organic.