Comment by _def
3 months ago
The question of how private property, intellectual property and posession/ownership should work is indeed something humanity hasn't properly figured out yet.
But if anything, regular people should have more of the cake.
3 months ago
The question of how private property, intellectual property and posession/ownership should work is indeed something humanity hasn't properly figured out yet.
But if anything, regular people should have more of the cake.
We have! The only problem is a very limited amount of legal decisions accidentally paved the way for a massive dystopia. In particular, the first sale doctrine [1] solves everything immediately.
The courts assumed good faith with a licensing exception, and maybe it was. But that opened the door to essentially completely dismantle the first-sale doctrine. Get rid of that loophole and all this stupidity ends, immediately. Well that and the DMCA. Once you buy something, it's yours to do whatever you want to do with it short of replicating it for commercial benefit.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine
We also need regulation to prevent unbreakable hardware locks. Integrating the locks deep into VLSI makes removing them unrealistic.
As a more specific way to do this, I'd like to see any software that hardware companies make for their own hardware designated (at the choice of the company) as either part of the hardware or a separate product. In the former case, it must be made available under GPLv3 with full anti-tivoization provisions. In the latter case, it must use only public and documented interfaces and must be completely realistic for another company to make a competing product on a level playing field. Ideally the separate products would also need to be highly cross platform if technically feasible where the burden of showing that it isn't is on the developer.
I'm not sure if we need regulations preventing it as much as we need regulations that manufacturers have to make it clear before buying the product.
Informed consent goes a long way.
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You might be right. We're seeing a paradox of more and more exclusive ownership of property for commercial interests (land, water, airwaves, orbits) and fewer and fewer exclusive ownership for individuals (rented homes, licensed software, subscriptions etc). I too think we're still in a transition stage and humanity has yet to figure this thing out.
It's actually what Marx was warning about - private property ending in the hands of the few as an endgame of capitalism.
Was Marx really warning us? I always read that as him describing his strategy to take down capitalism.
I.e. a warning would be if he didn't want it to happen, but my understanding is that he very much did.
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It's not we haven't figured it out. It is that gov and corp prefer to be shepherds and we are OK to be sheep. We figured it out a long time ago.
The solution certainly won't be through legislative or judicative powers as they have failed predictably and repeatedly. Sometimes reality must be molded a bit of fait accompli.
What are you proposing if not legislative or judicial means?
Those are the only checks of power on the executive built into our system. Are you expecting we would have to throw out our political system all together, get rid of the top by force, and start over?
No - private property is clear.
The question that hasn't fully been worked is how to allow people to think/feel they own something, while having no actual legal rights to it. But, as we see, this is being worked on.
Record companies figured that one out a long time ago.
Throwing your hat in the political ring?