Comment by keeda
9 days ago
> The entire set of laws supporting intellectual property boils down to making knowledge and transmission of certain numbers illegal.
It's illegal for me to write certain numbers on a piece of paper and give the paper to you.
That's just absurd and unacceptable.
Your bank account credentials are a bunch of numbers, would you be willing to share those? Surely you wouldn't bother changing them after the fact, I mean, literally victimless if someone copies them for their own use right? ;-)
That argument is completely unpersuasive. These are not the same things at all. In multiple ways.
First, there is no way do duplicate bank account contents. Bank transfers are transactions: adding to your account subtracts from mine. The bitcoin ledger is infinitely copyable but doing that gives no one extra bitcoins.
Contrast that with intellectual property which is the complete opposite: information can be losslessly duplicated infinitely at no cost whatsoever to either party.
Second, bank credentials are secrets. The information is not actually meant to be widely distributed, it's meant to be known by as few people as possible, ideally one person.
The secrecy exists precisely because once information is out there there is no way to control what will be done with it. Contrast that with copyright: the monopolists want to distribute the information world wide and simultaneously fully control what people do with it. The tyranny necessary to enforce such corporate control is utterly unacceptable.
So your bank account argument in fact supports my world view by exposing how utterly schizophrenic the copyright monopolists are. They actually think they can control public information that has been disseminated far and wide. It's so out of touch with the reality of things they might as well be put out of their misery. Just abolish copyright straight up.
>The secrecy exists precisely because once information is out there there is no way to control what will be done with it. Contrast that with copyright: the monopolists want to distribute the information world wide and simultaneously fully control what people do with it. The tyranny necessary to enforce such corporate control is utterly unacceptable.
The idea wouldn't exist if such tyranny didn't exist in the first place. What causes a drug company to invest billions into creating life saving drugs? If all ideas are open source then there's NO incentive for ANYONE to invest billions into ideas.
That's why copyrights and patent laws exist. To function as incentive in the creation of new ideas.
Pick and choose: Either you can only interact with the idea under monopolist rules. Or the idea doesn't exist period. Overall, humanity (aka the actual "we") has picked the former over the later.
> Overall, humanity (aka the actual "we") has picked the former over the later.
Did humanity really pick that? I doubt it. Copyright infringement happens too often and too normally for me to believe people care about copyrights. Politicians bought and paid for by lobbyists picked that.
Anyway, I'll go ahead and expicitly pick the latter over the former. I would rather have the nonexistence of ideas over infinite monopolist control. Let the entire copyright industry go bankrupt if necessary.
Mercifully, it will not actually be necessary. Platforms like Patreon and GitHub Sponsors are the future. They work independently of copyrights. They are how creators should be funded for their valuable work. As a society, we need to figure out how to normalize and increase their use as much as possible.
Also, nonexistence of ideas is incompatible with human nature. People will create, profit or not. They must. The creative output will significantly decrease but it will not be wiped out. As a free software developer, I am living proof.
> What causes a drug company to invest billions into creating life saving drugs?
Patents.
I am not as strongly opposed to patents as I am to copyright. Unlike copyrights, patents actually expire in reasonable timeframes. Patents have none of this lifetime plus a trillion years nonsense. They also typically apply to physical goods and inventions.
So even though I believe all intellectual property is fundamentally absurd, I would compromise at patents. They are absurd monopolies, but they are tolerable. Their absurdity will end well within my lifetime. The ideas will be freed. Generic versions of the drugs will be made.
Copyright in its current form has none of the above properties.
Nintendo selling people the exact same Mario ROMs half a century after the fact is nothing but pure unadulterated rent seeking. They have already made their fortunes several times over. Let the works enter the public domain. They should have to continuously create new works if they want to keep making money, not strike gold once and live off the rent for all eternity.
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So now we have established that not all numbers are "just numbers" that can be copied victimlessly.
Consider that maybe it is because some numbers represent something more than just numeric values. Maybe they represent economic value.
Said economic value having been generated by your hard work.
Now maybe you can see how that line of thought leads to the concept of intellectual property.
Information covered by IP is "public" simply because there is no effective way to keep it secret, precisely because it is so easy to copy. However, as the bank account example shows, ease of copying "just numbers" has nothing to do with the effort invested into creating the value represented by those numbers. And IP laws exist precisely to account for that.
We've established nothing of the sort. Secrets can be copied just as trivially as any other information. That's why numerous measures are taken to avoid their revelation.
If I tell people my bank credentials, I have nobody but myself to blame when money is transferred out of my accounts.
If I upload my secret encryption keys to some cloud service, I have nobody but myself to blame when others gain the ability to decrypt my data.
Yet I'm expected to feel sorry for would be monopolists who publish works and expect to dictate what you do with them? No.
The effort invested into creation of value is often completely irrelevant, even in copyright law. Many countries do not subscribe to the "sweat of the brow" doctrine, USA included. The ones that do seem to reserve its application for specific contexts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweat_of_the_brow
Originality is the key factor in copyrightability, not the effort required to generate the content. The number must be unique and not derived from other numbers.
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