Comment by matheusmoreira
9 days ago
> 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.
Crowd funding already exists. The biggest and most powerful corporations on the planet are all crowd funded. They have entire markets dedicated to crowd funding. NYSE, NASDAQ, etc.