Comment by ninetyninenine
8 days ago
>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.
>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.
Let's focus on the overall idea. IP. not the instantiations of the idea like patents and copyright. You're against the very idea of ideas as property. And YES humanity chose the concept of IP. It's encoded into the laws of government which people trust. Additionally entire businesses and corporations building civilization changing technologies ONLY exist because of IP.
>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.
Human nature is prehistoric instincts for hunter gatherers. Capital, profit, business and centralization of power is responsible for the ideas responsible for human civilization as we know it.
How do you mobilize thousands of humans to create a boeing 747 which is unionization of multitudes of people crystallizing ideas and focusing human effort to creating a feat of an idea that no single human can create? Capital and centralization of power.
You need to pay people, you need to take advantage of their need to survive and get a living wage to motivate such endeavors. You need the incentive to make them rich to have a person coordinate others into creating things like spaceX or google or openAI.
Obviously I am talking about the non-existance of MANY ideas. Not all ideas. And those "many" ideas make up almost all of human civilization itself.
You are a free software developer. You live off of charity. You're fringe. You're a side effect. Business engines drive profit and people get paid and that excess money is charitably given to you. If the business engines didn't exist you wouldn't. You are the exception to the rule. A massive exception, don't get me wrong, but still an exception. Open source would not exist were it not for closed source.
>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.
In principle they are the same. Medicine that saves lives wouldn't exist if it wasn't for patents. You tolerate patents but the essence is you think it's wrong, that is the issue I am addressing. If patents didn't exist most big pharma medicines wouldn't exist.
Do you tolerate the non-existence of life saving technologies created by big pharma in order to satisfy their own human greed? Covid for example. Think about the thing that drove big pharma to create these vaccines. 80 to 90 billion in profit is what drove these companies to develop these things at a speed and scale that won't exist without closed source.
What mobilized the smartest minds to work together in such synchrony to produce the vaccines? You think patreon could do it? You think a future surviving off of donations from patreon would motivate all the smartest minds to spend years on training to develop the expertise necessary to stop the pandemic and then finally come together for patreon? lol.
> Human nature is prehistoric instincts for hunter gatherers. Capital, profit, business and centralization of power is responsible for the ideas responsible for human civilization as we know it.
You state this as fact, but the anthropological consensus doesn't agree with this.
Early hunter gatherer societies are thought to have been communal, with no notion of property. It's not "human nature".
> How do you mobilize thousands of humans to create a boeing 747 which is unionization of multitudes of people crystallizing ideas and focusing human effort to creating a feat of an idea that no single human can create? Capital and centralization of power.
This is an ideological argument, which is fine, but nothing anywhere close to "the truth", and especially, not the only or best way to organize things.
You want to have this argument, fine, but you'll have to step down from the teaching desk and accept your belief is not universal.
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> You're against the very idea of ideas as property. And YES humanity chose the concept of IP.
Humanity chose the fruits of intellectual property. More books. More movies. More music. More art. More inventions. More technology. More everything. Humanity chose wealth.
Time limited monopolies were merely the means to bring about such wealth creation.
Monopolies are universally understood to be a bad sign in every economic sector. They were grudgingly implemented in this specific area only because nobody managed to come up with a better idea. Even then, laws were made so as to contain the damage as much as possible by limiting the duration of the monopolies.
It was absurd but it was the only way. People took care to ensure the nonsense did not last even a day longer than necessary.
It is now the 21st century. Humanity must evolve past this.
> It's encoded into the laws of government which people trust.
Laws that were pretty much written by industry lobbyists. Anyone who trusts that is foolish.
Intellectual property is supposed to be a time limited monopoly, yet copyright is functionally infinite in duration because the industry kept lobbying for extensions.
The people were systematically robbed of their public domain rights. Seriously doubt the people chose that.
> How do you mobilize thousands of humans to create a boeing 747
By actually manufacturing and selling aircrafts to airlines? 747s are not infinitely copyable. Discussion has now shifted from ideas to tangible objects.
> You are a free software developer. You live off of charity.
I don't work in the software industry. My aversion to intellectual property and licensing is a big reason why.
> You think patreon could do it?
Remains to be seen. There should be no functional difference between raising hundreds of millions from venture capitalists or crowdfunding. We just need to find ways to raise these platforms to the billion dollar scale.
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