Comment by ninetyninenine
8 days ago
>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.
>You state this as fact, but the anthropological consensus doesn't agree with this.
Yes it does. This is anthropology 101. In hunter gatherer societies wealth doesn't really exist. People eat and get resources off the land without ever really accumulating wealth. For civilization to form, first wealth must evolve into a form where it is abundant, identical and useable like coins.
So like grain when extremely abundant naturally maps into something like coins where people instead of bartering can "pay" others with grain and save up on grain. If humans begin farming and then grain becomes very abundant in society, something changes.
It then becomes possible for the accumulation of resources by a central source as in one person owns more grain than another person. Wealth inequality so to say. When one person is much more wealthy than another, this allows him to gain a sort of artificial power over others by employing others and paying them a salary. This CAN only exist if some static countable resource exists that can function in place of a monetary denomination.
This is ultimately what causes people to coordinate. No amount of leadership or charisma is going to herd humans into a organized team of hundreds to build projects as complex as a boeing 747. You HAVE to pay people for this to happen. You have to offer them something that benefits them that's more then just your charisma.
These are the projects that define civilization.
This is IN FACT the anthropological consensus on how civilization forms in academia. I'm not making this up. Go read up on it, this is how they believe advanced civilization formed in some places and didn't in others. So places that are really tropical tend not to form advance civilization because things like grain rot. This prevents anyone from accumulating resources which prevents wealth inequality which prevents a single individual coordinating other individuals to create the public works that define modern civilization as we know it.
>Early hunter gatherer societies are thought to have been communal, with no notion of property. It's not "human nature".
You're describing tribes and hunter and gatherers. I'm describing civilization. The next step. Mesopotamia. The progression from tribes and cavemen to civilization involves the steps I describe above.
Also I'm not calling "civilization" natural. Nothing of the sort. The times we live in are not natural at all. Modern civilization is NOT natural. But. Capitalism, wealth inequality and business DOES form the basis of civilization as we know it. In short, IP is fundamental to civilization, but it is not necessarily natural. I am more appealing to whether you value the idea of civilization itself, and less to whether something is compatible to human nature in its earliest form as these are two orthogonal concepts.
>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.
Ideological my ass, there's barely any evidence of complex projects forming out of pure communal goodwill. The only time I've seen people do something like this of equal complexity out in the wild is Linux. And it only happened because Linux is uniquely a software project which is very cheap to develop for. And EVEN then open source developers for linux need corporate jobs in order to get paid a living wage so that they can afford to have spare time working on a charity project like Linux. Linux exists because developer time working on Linux is paid for by FOR-profit corporations.
>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.
It's not a belief. That's what you're missing. The logic composes into a singular conclusion. I'm right. You may not agree with me now and that's just part of human nature. Maybe think about it for a couple months and eventually you may hit the realization that your idea of how the world works was a little off. Yeah I know I'm an asshole for sort of bluntly burying everyone I see with the brutal truth, but think about it for a bit.
> 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.
>By actually manufacturing and selling aircrafts to airlines? 747s are not infinitely copyable. Discussion has now shifted from ideas to tangible objects.
The raw materials used to create a boeing 747 are not rare at all. They are easily accessible. The aggregate value of material cost of a 747 is significantly less than the actual value of the 747 itself meaning that much of the worth of the 747 is in the crystallization of the idea of what a 747 is. The 747 is at it's core an idea, that's what separates it from just being a just a mishmash of random materials. It is at it's core an IP.
Yes it's not infinitely copyable so it doesn't suffer from the ill effects of software. But they are one in the same, it's just that the 747 has additional protections of the "idea" being encrypted into the plane itself and the people who make the plane. Software the idea is fully crystallized into a single place: the source code and it suffers from being easily copied.
This is where IP law comes from. The idea of a 747 is by nature not easily copied, so people didn't need to instantiate the concept of IP because by default it's just harder to copy. IP was invented because of the distinction between ideas that are easily copied and not easily copied. People wanted to bring the properties of the 747 to software.
>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.
I think we're in agreement. We agree on the benefits and downsides of IP. You just think that altruism could function just as well as the incentives created by IP and it seems you're clear that there is currently no evidence to support your hypothesis other than a smattering of freak anomalies like Linux. Whether that evidence will materialize in the future remains to be seen.
> You just think that altruism could function just as well
Not at all. I'm no proponent of altruism.
I proposed crowdfunding as the alternative. As in, entire nations worth of people investing money to make something happen. Decentralized investors.
Once intellectual work is done, the value of the intangible product trends towards zero. Selling things that have infinite supply makes no economic sense. Society needs to find a way to pay creators before the work is done. Creations must be treated as investments rather than products.
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