Comment by warkdarrior
19 hours ago
> These corporations are rent seeking monopolists. Like many Japanese companies, Sony is an intellectual property absolutist.
The whole intellectual property space is pure rent seeking. Everybody wants name recognition and/or money whenever some text, code, image, or video they produced is used or remixed. It is pure rent seeking, from FSF to Sony to Metallica.
> The whole intellectual property space is pure rent seeking. Everybody wants name recognition and/or money whenever some text, code, image, or video they produced is used or remixed. It is pure rent seeking, from FSF to Sony to Metallica.
If that's true, so is the private property space in general.
But what you say isn't true. The "intellectual property space" is not pure rent seeking. If someone labors to write a novel, they're no less justified to get economic benefit from it than someone who labored to build an apartment building.
Intellectual property critics have a tendency to throw the baby out with the bathwater. There are problems with IP, but those specific should be fixed through reform.
Copyright has never existed for the benefit of authors, and anyone who authors a scientific paper knows this. Copyright has always benefited the publishing industry and was established at the request of publishers in the first place, after they lost the monopoly they had under the previous censorship regime (the "star chamber"). Authors receive at best a small fraction of the sales of their work and most authors never receive enough compensation to actually live on, hence the expression "don't quit your day job."
At this point copyright is an obsolete system. It was set up at a time when large-scale copying required an industrial operation, and that is simply not the reality of the world anymore. We do not need to "reform" copyright, we need to build a brand new system that is more reflective of modern technology. Maybe that new system will actually focus on compensating authors as there is no need for a publishing industry, or maybe we will just accept that authors are not guaranteed any payment for their work and will have to make money some other way.
> Copyright has never existed for the benefit of authors, and anyone who authors a scientific paper knows this.
That's some bizarre logic: copyright predates the existence of scientific papers [edit: published as a for-profit activity dependent on copyright]. Why would the 20/21st century experience of publishing a scientific paper have any bearing on what it's always been?
Scientific publishing is messed up because, unlike most other creative work, it has a different funding model (basically state patronage), which basically makes the publishers very profitable parasites. That should be addressed directly instead of abolishing copyright for all works.
> Authors receive at best a small fraction of the sales of their work and most authors never receive enough compensation to actually live on, hence the expression "don't quit your day job." ... or maybe we will just accept that authors are not guaranteed any payment for their work and will have to make money some other way.
That's more bizarre logic: "Authors don't get paid enough, so lets take away their rights so they get paid less."
> At this point copyright is an obsolete system. It was set up at a time when large-scale copying required an industrial operation, and that is simply not the reality of the world anymore.
Copyright was setup before the industrial revolution, so your statement doesn't make sense. Also, at least in some countries, its foundation is the moral rights of the author, not some argument about production.
> We do not need to "reform" copyright, we need to build a brand new system that is more reflective of modern technology. Maybe that new system will actually focus on compensating authors as there is no need for a publishing industry, or maybe we will just accept that authors are not guaranteed any payment for their work and will have to make money some other way.
You're throwing the baby out with the bathwater. It seems like you have gripes coming from a particular problem area (scientific publishing?) and are too narrowly focused on that. "I have this gripe, lets decommission this important legacy system, and then rewrite it completely from scratch!" is usually not a good plan.
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This discussion probably doesn’t fit in HN comment boxes, but how would you a) motivate people to create without any form of compensation or b) create the artificial scarcity needed to force compensation for goods with essentially infinite supply?
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the labourer who built the apartment doesnt get a hundred year claim to economic benefit from that apartment though?
are you saying that electricians should get a monthly rent fee from any circuit theyve touched?
i think we can do just fine treating IP like other work - you pay for the creation of it, not the consumption
> the labourer who built the apartment doesnt get a hundred year claim to economic benefit from that apartment though?
> are you saying that electricians should get a monthly rent fee from any circuit theyve touched?
My example was a simplification, so don't take it to literally.
It's also worth noting that other property rights have no time limit. Except in China, whoever owns that apartment building can own it forever.
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>the labourer who built the apartment doesnt get a hundred year claim to economic benefit from that apartment though?
they do if they build their own house and rent it out
Toll roads exist because sometimes that's the best way to make the money to construct a road. But they are the exception, not the rule, and they don't last forever either.
It's called copyright as things change when works are easy and cheap to copy.
Replicating work of an electrician or builder is very similar effort to their original work.
Making a copy of a novel or software program or art today is practically free.
In case of work for hire, things pretty much work the same way already — company owns the copyright, except in some jurisdictions where actual humans keep "moral rights" and reserve the right to renegotiate the fee if the work produces disproportionate earnings (one cannot even transfer these rights away).
But if you did the work out of pocket, how should it work? Any recipient could trivially and cheaply produce a copy and distribute it. If you do not get any exclusivity at all, others would profit a lot more and you'd get nothing at all.
So in general, there are multiple things:
* exclusivity lasts too long (I understand some motivation like supporting your children off it, especially if work only became profitable late in your life or in death, but you could have different mechanisms too — akin to moral rights, exclusivity could run from the moment it turns a significant profit like an average annual salary, and for a fixed, much shorter period after)
* types of works which are utilitarian (like software tools) should have entirely different treatment
* it should ensure both transferability and perpetuity of use (no licensing bullshit and your games/music are gone because our service does not offer them anymore)
...
Copyright is a monopoly granted by the government on what's essentially numbers. It's a lot like democracy: utterly terrible, yet somehow the least bad way to accomplish some goal, in this case compensating creators for their labor.
In its current form, it is absolutely rent seeking. We will be dead and buried long before our culture enters the public domain. The so called "stakeholders" have systematically robbed us of our public domain rights.
Limit copyright duration to at most 20 years and it will still be a disgusting monopoly on numbers, but at least it won't be intolerable. We might actually forget that we can use technology to trivially copy stuff at negligible costs.
They are the same yes, except we don't have yet a technology to instantly copy whatever macrosized object ad nauseam like we can with intellectual work in digital era.
If anyone could duplicate the whole universe at will, of course current human laws would all seem as silly as those covering random virtual monopoly on cognitive experience possibilities.
Exactly. Digital IP can be transferred infinitely and cheaply (by copying it) without loss of use. Physical items cannot (yet!?) be transferred infinitely and cheaply without loss of use. Once the item is transferred, the previous holder of the physical item loses use of it.
> If someone labors to write a novel, they're no less justified to get economic benefit from it than someone who labored to build an apartment building.
They absolutely are, because an apartment building is a _rival_ good, as are all physical goods, meaning that you and somebody else cannot both own and use it at the same time. Intellectual property is a non-rival good, meaning if somebody else copies your song or story, you still have that song/story! It's a very different moral claim; the apartment is "I built it, so nobody should be able to take it away from me without paying", while the IP is "I built it, so nobody else should be able to copy it without paying".
> They absolutely are, because an apartment building is a _rival_ good, as are all physical goods, meaning that you and somebody else cannot both own and use it at the same time.
I don't think that distinction is as important as you make it out to be. Private property law allows individuals to own far, far more physical goods than they can personally use.
If were going to talk about abolishing intellectual property, how about lets talk about abolishing private property too? Maybe replace it with some kind of active-use right.
Anyway, lets destroy it first and work the details out later. /s