I think the idea behind intellectual property is to encourage people to take risks associated with developing something new and profit through their innovations. If all new discoveries were the property of the state/public then there wouldn't be a high incentive to be inventive for any given individual.

It's like if everyone was a farmer but everything harvested was immediately taken from the farmer. Why would any farmer put in effort to increase yield when they would not profit from their extra effort?

> I think the idea behind intellectual property is to encourage people to take risks associated with developing something new and profit through their innovations.

No, the idea is to prevent other people from profiting through 'claimed' innovations.

> If all new discoveries were the property of the state/public then there wouldn't be a high incentive to be inventive for any given individual.

Most innovation is not done for money. It's done by people with genuine interest in the subject, often earning less than an average professional in the field. The vast majority of valuable R&D for computer(s/ing) came, and still comes from the public sector.

> It's like if everyone was a farmer but everything harvested was immediately taken from the farmer.

Why is it that intellectual property proponents always try to make analogies using physical property? Copying != moving/deleting. If I was a farmer and along came some poor hungry people that saw me farming, learned from it, then went and farmed their own land, I would have no problem with that.

> Why would any farmer put in effort to increase yield when they would not profit from their extra effort?

If we're talking about innovation, then because it could make farming easier, safer, more enjoyable, healthier, etc.

Its unfortunate that out economical system discourages sharing and rewards those who act selfishly. If the farmers needs were taken care of, they would push to make better tech to make their lives easier and provide more food for the rest of their country.

The best system humans have come up with to meet the needs of the farmer is capitalism. Think of all the selfish actors whose countless innovations (big and small) go into making sure peoples needs are met. The irony of capitalism is that by each individual focusing on themselves society is the beneficiary.

The farmers needs are more than met under capitalism than under any other economic system people have thought up (to date). That’s why innovation happens more in capitalist societies.

Communism, as a counterpoint, is pinned on selflessness. Think of your brothers and your sisters! Work hard and freely give away your labor, for everyone will give you their labor. Think about the good of the nation! The irony is that this system minimizes innovation and maximizes a cruel society.

Why should a capitalist society, whose individuals act for the good of themselves, have a stronger societial fabric than a communist society, whose individuals act for the good of society?

Who knows, but I certainly am not willing to throw out such a proven system just because it’s raw “selfish” focus at the micro level makes people a little queasy.

I think that if we got rid of those incentives people would still innovate

If someone stole their invention and made money off it?? Why the hell would anyone want to invest time into that? Its not like the Chinese are pursuing some ideology of free knowledge, no they are trying to scoop for profit.

Why do people work on open source or give up time for charity? Not everyone is focused purely on collecting more money when their needs are already covered.

> when their needs are already covered

So few steps to go here then; many (by far most) inventors do not have that little detail so they rely on their invention being monetized to give them that. People in open source or charity often just have enough money/time to do that on the side, but most people do not.

Needs basic income or working communism; both do not exist (yet or ever) so how would that work?

Very few people work on open source. You will find that most people trade their hours for money.

I think most people are very willing to do things simply for the sake of improving the world as long as it doesn't mean giving up their quality of life. Many people offer help for free, pick up rubbish they didn't drop and work on improvements for things we all benefit on. The only problem we have currently is many people are busy with menial work to maintain their quality of life.

I think the solution is potentially a mix of automation providing cheap resources to everyone and government funding for useful research.

With open source, your work is still protected by copyright

Because they want to.

> I think that if we got rid of those incentives people would still innovate

Yes, but then they'd keep their innovations secret as trade secrets or they would only innovate when it was cheap and unrisky.

China stole trade secrets and technology from US Steel and Alcor (aluminum) that allowed them to catch up in technology at an unreasonable pace. This is just one huge example. They don't innovate, they steal and then copy, undercutting others' costs.

The US metal producing industry has taken a huge hit and they were the ones to put the R&D money into the production technology.

Do you have more info about this? I work in Steel and I admit I don't have a large high level picture of things, my understanding/perception is the tech innovation in recent decades have come largely from JKT (Japan, Korea, Taiwan) region those countries have the modern plants that are technologically interesting, my understanding is US plants are mostly older previous generation technology so I find it dubious that trade secrets from US plants would have much value any info would be less relevant to modern style plants being built in China.

I'm aware there is a lot of shades of grey around large commercially sensitive ore contract negotiations etc - see Stern Hu case https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-07-04/stern-hu-explainer-wh...

Not the parent, but I recall that Deng Xiaoping basically kicked off China's steel industry by buying a modern steel plant from Japan for a not insignificant portion of China's total GDP at the time. It was a risky investment which paid off.

Okay, but who decides what a "reasonable" pace is? Isn't more competition better? It's not school and you don't need to do your own work.

This line of thinking is too black and white.

What would incentive a company to invest millions in new technology, like a new cancer drug, if they have to give up their secrets as soon as they do? No one would bother inventing any at all.

And what about nuclear weapons? Are we supposed to think that it's better if every tin hat despot could just download plans for an ICBM?

> What would incentive a company to invest millions in new technology, like a new cancer drug, if they have to give up their secrets as soon as they do? No one would bother inventing any at all.

Well, the incentives around research are a bit weird. I'm usually all-in on free market capitalism, but I have to admit that historically government sponsorship has a pretty great track record for research.

For your specific question though, the answer could easily be because someone paid them up front to develop a new cancer drug. There is no question that companies that synthesise drugs are incentivised to research new products and deploy them as a stream of new and more effective drugs entering the market will cause it to grow in size and hence increase their profits. It is a question of debate about whether the current American IP system or natural incentives would give a better result overall.

> And what about nuclear weapons? Are we supposed to think that it's better if every tin hat despot could just download plans for an ICBM?

Splitting hairs, but it is debatable if building ICBMs is 'private knowledge' for the grandparent comment. That sort of tech is probably more of a grey-area public-knowledge style. It certainly isn't protected by the IP system, because then someone would be selling ICBMs to tin hat dictators. It isn't used in products that are sold to private entities either (I hope!).

Nuclear weapons are a good example of IP theft though. Russia stole plans from the US for nuclear weapons to get ahead. The US literally executed people for their role in it.

Which was also a good thing. Now every country has them, no one will use them because there is no longer any power imbalance.

Why wouldn't they use them? MAD only exists if there is a credible threat. Imagine that you are a leader of a small asian dictatorship with large amounts of starvation. Other countries threaten to invade to dethrone you. If you do nothing, you die.

You're likely to want to use anything you have to keep your power, including threatening to use your nukes if anyone tries anything. That threat is only credible if you are actually willing to do it.

So now we would just have a multitude of countries playing brinksmanship, seeing who can act the most reckless to convince everyone else not to mess with them because "I'll really do it, don't test me". Great, that sounds like a really wonderful world to live in.

Ya how dare anyone make money from their well researched work!!!

Its sad to think how many amazing inventions never get used because they are encumbered by patents or kept secret.

Patents allow for the knowledge to be documented and the patent has a limited term after which anyone can use it. Without patents, more things would be kept as a trade secret.

The majority of things in patents could not be kept secret. What we end up with is disposable products because every part is patented so you can't make replacements or other devices that are compatible.

For most things, feel free to reproduce patented parts for your own consumption, just don't give them away or try to sell them.

Thats a non answer. I don't have metal working tools sitting around in my shed that would let me whip up a replacement part for things. As a society we throw away so many things because they contain patented parts and the original company wont sell replacements or they sell them at enormous prices.

Hopefully in the future metal 3D printing becomes common and cheap so we will be able to source replacement parts from torrent websites.

Then what incentive do I have to spend money and innovate when everyone else can capitalize on it? That comment is a demotivational one for innovation in that it doesn't reward the entity that spend time and resources making it a reality.

Inventions could be publicly funded and then the findings be made available to everyone. We already pay for all the inventions we use indirectly so why not just fund them to begin with and actually have access to this information.

That's what academia is for. Perhaps we should ensure that academic research that is publicly funded doesn't end up with IP restrictions placed on it, and also expand the range of research academia engages in, to include more applied-research stuff and rediscovering/popularizing existing know-how that often is not publicly documented and might not even exist other than in tacit form. (This expanded scope for research would also help reduce waste due to academics overcrowding into a few über-popular fields of research, and largely duplicating efforts while trying to "scoop" one another.)

Of course, tacit know-how and first-to-market advantages will always exist to some extent. So, in a sense, we can't fully get rid of "IP"-like dynamics. But we can, and should, mitigate them.

And where are these unlimited funds you speak of? I have a few crazy ideas of my own, that I'm willing to pursue on someone else's dime.

We have the ability to automate almost everything needed for life. It seems realistic that you could spend all your time working on crazy ideas and cost no one a minute of their time.