There are many paths to an innovation. I don't think the first person deserves such a monopoly. American IP law, in combination with the generally letigious society, has always seemed like a net source of innovation friction...
A company that spends billions of dollars in research assumes they will be able to recoup the cost by having a monopoly on the drug they developed. If however competitors can flood the market with the same drug, they cannot recoup the cost and will subsequently go bankrupt.
Without the proper incentives you can’t expect companies to pursue strategies that will lead to bankruptcy.
We could publicly fund pharmaceutical research. Indeed, I suspect we'd be better off publicly funding it on cost terms alone. Global pharma research was $186 billion in 2019. [1] The US spends over $100 billion more on drugs compared with other countries' per-capita spending. [2] The current opioid crisis costs nearly $80 billion/year, [3] and was kicked off by a prescription opioid boom [4] driven by the promotion of Oxycontin. [5]
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/309471/randd-spending-sh...
[2] https://theincidentaleconomist.com/wordpress/what-makes-the-...
[3] https://www.drugabuse.gov/drug-topics/opioids/opioid-overdos...
You of course get a lot of imitation cokes and that’s great! More consumer choice. With Pharma, the idea is that you get generics after the patent expires. However, an interesting “what if” to ponder - what if the resources that go into generics went instead into the coke-wannabes of the pharma and actually resulted in more innovation? We’ll never know.
Public funding is fine for when your end-goal is known. In medicine, the end-goal is known: cure/manage condition X, which will save lives or improving quality of life of sufferers.
Optimising for patentable, innovative techniques is no longer a distraction (because those aren't needed to "protect your investment"). Optimising for ongoing therapy rather than a one-off/infrequent cure is no longer a distraction because you already got your money from the government and ain't getting any more. You can just focus on getting the job done quickly, with the cheapest techniques available (though boring they might be), and with the cheapest possible total cost of running the therapy start-to-end.
And still, Moderna and BioNTech came up with vaccines for COVID-19, not therapies.
Name three, and give reasons to believe that there's no cure for business reasons. If you can't name at least three (of the "many conditions"), then how can you be so sure of this?
#2) Oxycontin. We have far better cures for short-term pain management. A 1996 internal email from Sackler: "get an audience for our patent infringement suits so that we are feared as a tiger with claws, teeth and balls, and build some excitement with prescribers that OxyContin Tablets is [sic] the way to go.15" (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5234149/)
#3) Unnecessary procedures (440k/deaths year from medical errors -https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5234149/)
2) > We have far better cures
So you’re saying there are cures. Great then. Please re-read the gp's question. For 3) as well...
There is research that solidly backs this up. Taxpayers are bankrolling the industries but it's the shareholders who are reaping the rewards. It's further support for the argument that IP should not be private but rather commonly shared.
Outside of running restaurants, people who innovate in recipes tend to make money via either writing cookbooks or hosting TV shows. Both of which are protected by IP.
This is a mis-statement of the anti-IP case. Given the abolishment of IP laws, creators are not prevented from benefitting from their invention. They merely no longer have the benefit of the state regulators in preventing others from following the inventor's example.
> Including any monetary benefits if they so choose.
The "monetary benefit" here is the power to exclude others from manufacturing the invention with the power of the state, and to compel society at large to pay for enforcement of this monopoly.
To me, the solution is to let the cycle repeat. Let the next animation company start making stories about Spidier-Man or Luke Skywalker. Sure, keep the trademarks so you can't say "Marvels™ Spidier-Man", but John Smith should be able to take a crack at his version of Spider-Man just like Walt got his version of Cinderella.
I'm pretty sure they'd have to hire their own animators in order to produce a product to sell. Theft is still a crime, we would be removing Disney's ability to use the police to shut down the work of amateur animators.
https://www.denofgeek.com/books/disney-refuses-to-pay-royalt...
Nonsense, they can sell their own artwork too.
But in patents, sometimes it is just a person who noticed that existing technologies X and Y could be used together, and filed the patent first. If not them, someone else would have noticed it somewhat later. Even worse, someone else may get the idea independently a few weeks later... and then be sued for using it. Actually, if you invent something, it is always risky to use it, because you can never be sure whether someone else didn't patent it before you. (Did you do an expensive research of existing patents? Maybe you used a wrong keyword.) (By the way, patents also sometimes do not belong to people who had the idea.)
(Btw, an example for your question is to look up the origin of this thing we are using to communicate—the WWW)
Being able to extract substantial rent in effective perpetuity from e.g. some copyright you own is a luxury only afforded to a relatively small minority, and ideally I think only productive work should be awarded, not rent. That will incentivize productive work rather than rent seeking.
You're only getting paid because people have to pay you the market rate for your work. If a musician creates and records a song [1], releases it at market rates (say, 2 USD), and everyone can just copy it without repercussions, he won't be able to make a living, no matter how productive he is.
[1] Which entails many hours of work, plus equipment costs.
It's really a strange, indirect way to go about it, though. It doesn't in itself incentivize further work (a lot of the music I still regularly pay for was recorded by dead artists in defunct studios, so no incentive short of Frankenstein will compel them to make more) and it may or may not cover the investment the artist/studio made in terms of actual work and equipment costs.
The up front costs is in creating and recording the music, which consumers could pay for instead of copies. A lot of creative artists are already taking this approach with crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter and Patreon.
Even now, it's probably true for most musicians that sales of copies isn't particularly lucrative compared to concerts/work for hire/project contracts, while recordings have an ever increasing number of pockets to line before the artists get their take. It's a potentially infinite revenue source, so why not?
Are you talking about me? Which part of my posts is not "logical"?
> If you are in the 1% who gets a nice fat check thanks to IP laws, hurray for you.
I'm not. Some people are able to hold opinions that don't directly benefit them. Inconceivable, right?
> You can promote the Big Lie all you want, but any smart honest person will figure out eventually that IP is evil from every angle.
That's not even an argument. And you're accusing me of being "immune to logical conversations"?
I do apologize for me jumping on you there and assuming bad faith, it’s just that most folks who raise similar points to you are coming from that, but wasn’t fair of me to assume the worst from you. I like your point about holding opinions that go against your own self-interest (being against IP has personally cost me a fortune), and I encourage you to delve more into this issue.
You've neglected to argue as to why these needs should be artificially subsidized by the issuance of state-enforced monopolies for certain concepts.
... What? Avicebron argued that "financial reciprocation" should not be a priority of a creator, I countered that idealism won't keep you alive for long, and that creators need to make money to be able to create. Your post is completely beside the point.
So who's going to pay them? Their employer? That raises two problems: 1) Creators can't be independent and self-employed anymore, and 2) how is their employer going to make enough money?
A rich patron? That's hardly a better system.
Whoever wants artwork, obviously.
> 1) Creators can't be independent and self-employed anymore,
Actually, there are plenty of independent creators who are either self-employed or work at a job.
> 2) how is their employer going to make enough money?
Presumably the reason they are an employer is their ability to run a successful enterprise.
> A rich patron? That's hardly a better system.
Why not?
Many great works of art have come to us via this system. In our time, isnt that what Patreon is?
The over-simplified summary is that instead of worrying about the losing the monopoly protection of copyrights and patents - which are expensive to enforce and often bypassed - consider the new types of innovation that become possible when you have access to the all of the knowledge that was previously locked behind IP monopolies.
Do you mean a world where YouTube takes money from creators and give it to corporations that claim ownership of public domain music, or do you mean independent artist who gets zero money from their Spotify plays, since the three company cartel of record companies have forced streaming services to pool the artists’ money and then give most of that money to the biggest artists fronted by those same three record companies..?
This abuse is wholly dependent on the outrageous IP laws we live under.
Which creators are you talking about?
We can also chose to reward innovators both for the effort and the result. It should be in proportion tho, an invention that makes you the owner of the world is not desirable for anyone else.
And finally, the most ironic, you don't have innovation if you are renting it. (they don't even have to let you rent it) Its a well crafted con that turns you into a subject to be exploited in any way the ~~innovator~~ owner chooses.
they are entitled to the benefits of their creation. by executing their idea better than others. and selling that execution competitively.
We've had innovations for thousands of years without IP. Not to mention that Linux and GNU exist for a reason. Do you think people will stop writing books, making music, etc without IP laws.
> Including any monetary benefits if they so choose.
How does removing IP laws prevent you from profiting from your work?
15 years is plenty of time, then everything needs to be released into the public domain.
The lack of a monopoly creates competition which accelerates innovation and leads to cheaper, higher quality products for the consumer. The person who invents a product should simply be one competitor in the market, they can have the first mover advantage, but shouldn't be allowed to control the market entirely.
If we believe in the FOSS ethos that no one has the right to own software, even if they write it, then why would this only apply to software? Why not to all forms of intellectual property? Why do I have a moral right to fork, rewrite and redistribute Firefox but not Star Wars or Pfizer Pharmaceuticals?
But that obviously wouldn't as work well, because:
1. The inventor would pay the R&D costs with no good way to recoup them, because he'd be competing against knockoffs who didn't have to make that investment, and can price accordingly. You'd be putting the actual inventor at a disadvantage.
2. There'd be no incentive for inventors to actually publish designs for their inventions. Most people who argue against patents as a concept forget is that to get one you have to publish plans for your idea openly, which makes it much easier to copy. The limited monopoly is an incentive to part with that information. You'd end up leaving the public domain poorer.
3. Invention and production are different skillsets. For an author to get paid for writing, they shouldn't need to own a printing press and distribution network. It's a good thing that good, successful authors can make their livings by writing and not always be forced to sustain themselves with a day job.
The original ideas behind IP are very, very sounds. What we need is to roll back how the implementation of those ideas has been corrupted to society's detriment.
Yes, the means of ensuring that research and development would be funded would have to change. This doesn't imply that there would be no r&d, rather the current r&d is being subsidized by laws that give legal privileges to certain corporations while prohibiting their competition from competing.
> 2. There'd be no incentive for inventors to actually publish designs for their inventions. Most people who argue against patents as a concept forget is that to get one you have to publish plans for your idea openly, which makes it much easier to copy. The limited monopoly is an incentive to part with that information. You'd end up leaving the public domain poorer.
You could pay them for the design. Or you could reverse engineer the design from the actual physical product.
> 3. Invention and production are different skillsets. For an author to get paid for writing, they shouldn't need to own a printing press and distribution network.
likewise people shouldn't be subject to violence for copying intangibles.
So what? They would just need to sell the research at profit instead of subsidizing it with future monopoly revenue.
Patents are nowadays written to obscure the research as much as possible anyway.
And remember how putting a 3D printer in a box to keep the material warm has been patented? Suuuure, wouldn't get discovered independently.
>> 2. There'd be no incentive for inventors to actually publish designs for their inventions. Most people who argue against patents as a concept forget is that to get one you have to publish plans for your idea openly, which makes it much easier to copy. The limited monopoly is an incentive to part with that information. You'd end up leaving the public domain poorer.
> So what? They would just need to sell the research at profit instead of subsidizing it with future monopoly revenue.
That doesn't actually address the concern; it just moves it around a little.
So, there's at least two cases to consider: something that was difficult to develop and either a) easy to reverse engineer or b) hard to reverse engineer.
With (a), why would someone pay for the research when it's just going to be cloned by their competitors for free? It's the same situation the inventor is in.
With (b), why would the inventor ever publicize the research behind the invention or product? It'd end up being a trade secret, and probably be monopolized (for potential a longer period) or lost altogether.
For instance, with 3D printers, maybe instead of them becoming ubiquitous after the patent expiration, the inventor kept the technology secret and used to start a rapid prototyping company. Maybe they couldn't keep that up forever, but it's quite conceivable they could for longer than a patent term.
> And remember how putting a 3D printer in a box to keep the material warm has been patented? Suuuure, wouldn't get discovered independently.
That's not an argument against patents, but an argument against the current threshold of patentability. Also, there are a lot of things that only seem obvious after you've seen them done.
I think that's a reasonable idea, and I believe it's called "compulsory licensing."
>1. The inventor would pay the R&D costs with no good way to recoup them, because he'd be competing against knockoffs who didn't have to make that investment, and can price accordingly. You'd be putting the actual inventor at a disadvantage.
It's now clear that there are plenty of ways to fund R&D without relying on IP law to recoup the costs. Another reply goes into this better, so I want to also point out another benefit: the incentive to perform R&D, without IP law, is less likely to be "in order to make a profit," and more likely to be "because whoever is funding it wants it to be done," whether for itself or because they want the end product to exist.
Remember that an open market capitalist economy is _a method for allocating resources within a society towards ends that people actually want_. Doing R&D for profit is an indirect way of incentivising companies to produce things that people want. Without monopoly licensing, the incentive to the company is directly to research & develop something that people want - the funders, at a minimum.
Some lessons from e.g. machine learning research show that any slight misalignment in objective when you have a powerful optimising system, like a corporation, will be ruthlessly exploited, until what you end up with is nothing like what you wanted. In particular, instead of solely making things that people want, companies spend massive amounts of effort on making people want the things they make.
>2. There'd be no incentive for inventors to actually publish designs for their inventions. Most people who argue against patents as a concept forget is that to get one you have to publish plans for your idea openly, which makes it much easier to copy. The limited monopoly is an incentive to part with that information. You'd end up leaving the public domain poorer.
This argument is nearly completely redundant these days. Nowadays, to reproduce something it's almost always enough just to know it's possible, let alone knowing precisely how or even having a working example. If that wasn't the case, why are copyrights necessary on manufactured physical products like drugs? The producers wouldn't be concerned about their products being copied if it wasn't possible to do so without explicit instructions.
Another poster brought up that patents are now written to be as obscure as possible anyway - also true, nearly removing all public benefit that might have been obtained from such a system in the first place.
>3. Invention and production are different skillsets. For an author to get paid for writing, they shouldn't need to own a printing press and distribution network. It's a good thing that good, successful authors can make their livings by writing and not always be forced to sustain themselves with a day job.
This just makes you seem out of touch with the modern reality of the writing industry. You may have heard that most musicians, apart from a few mega popular ones, make their money from live performance & merchandise. Writing is going a similar way. Self publishing is a bigger and bigger thing, lots of authors have communities or are supported directly by fans & merchandise. There are multiple companies that can print any arbitrary work into a physical book for you without requiring ownership of the IP.
Of course under the current system there will always be a few big winners, but for the aspiring new writer it's pretty unlikely you'll get very far unless you're exceptionally talented or you know people high up in the industry.
Essentially, because the average creator doesn't have a realistic shot at making money from licensing anyway, they are already adopting models that work in the absence of licensing revenue. If I were to boil it down, they're mostly selling one of three things: community, experiences, and anticipation of future creations that wouldn't otherwise exist (in other words, investment, except the investors don't own the creator's work or otherwise receive any formal stake.)
The original ideas behind IP were conceived in a different time, and many of the assumptions simply don't apply any more. It's possible that there are still good reasons why some form of IP needs to exist, but these tired justifications aren't it.
Unfortunately, this is not possible on Earth, because pretty much every square meter is already claimed by some entity, but there's virtually infinite room in the solar system.
[1] Like O'Neill cylinders https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27Neill_cylinder or the Stanford torus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_torus
[2] Regular contenders are UBI, abolishing IP or private property, and communism.
[3] Kind of like in Scott Alexander's "Archipelago and Atomic Communitarianism" essay: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/07/archipelago-and-atomic...
I don't. So what now?
15 years is plenty of time, then every slave needs to be released into the public domain.
This seems like an odd claim, as society as a whole was able to weather the pandemic overall in incredible comfort due to technology and content created under our IP regime. And we got a vaccine, covered by IP laws, to people with incredible speed. If anything - it's working well.
I think the burden is on you to demonstrate that we'd have these things without the IP environment of past 100 years.
strike "under" insert "in spite of"
> demonstrate that we'd have these things without the IP environment of past 100 years.
IP are laws that prohibit who is allowed to manufacture and profit by certain types of goods. The burden of proof rests on those who think that those goods would not exist if more people were permitted to produce them. The presumption is that prohibitive laws have the effect of decreasing the things they prohibit.
If private property exists, with any sort of free exchange, then IP that takes resources to produce and nothing to copy will need protection under some sort of property law.
A high tech society is imaginable in the absence of private property, but generally the abolition of private property is not considered as a serious option.
No, it doesn't need to be protected. The ability to copy is a feature, not a bug. Laws that limit the copying of data decrease the proliferation of that data in most cases.
> A high tech society is imaginable in the absence of private property, but generally the abolition of private property is not considered as a serious option.
I see people mentioning it but I agree its considered to be somewhat fringe by most. A society without private property would likely devolve to subsistence level or recreate propertarian norms.
When one has too much power or capital, the ability for one to rewrite the laws that govern the taxation of the accrued private property (intellectual or physical) increases as well. This is why those with the most private property can essentially do as they please; the benefits they derive from their private property are disproportionately high compared to the cost that society incurs protecting their private property.
For instance, the workload that the government is tasked with to protect private property of these elites at home (e.g. the large amount of police resources that need to be available for large tech campuses or in rich areas) and abroad (e.g. by tasking the Acronym Agencies with searching for foreign and domestic threats, by using the might of the dollar and the military to basically force their will on other countries through political, physical, or financial violence (FATCA comes to mind...) [0]).
Private property needs to stay, but the incarnation we find ourselves in today needs to evolve for it to survive. Either through taxes or government stakeholdership in corporations (e.g. Yanis Varoufakis' proposal that companies must give X percentage of their shares to a common fund such that the incentives are aligned for both the companies and the government to act in the long-term interests of its citizens), this imbalance of power needs to be corrected for.
The one thing undermining this is a distrust in the US government that is rightfully earned after decades of neoliberalism (and, to a different perspective, neoconservatism) has worked hand in hand with the elites to steal and pillage the private property of the common man (e.g. how Warren Buffet's secretary pays a higher tax percentage that he does).
Unfortunately I don't see this happening. Things are getting worse in the US as public institutions are eroding or becoming more kleptocratic, all the while the elites are starting to act more like feudal lords, thinking that some libertarian wet dream of privatization of everything is the answer (private military and private firefighters come to mind for the extremely wealthy few). This technofeudalism will probably only be stopped by some major shift in global power (e.g. away from the dollar as the world's reserve currency, which I suspect would provoke the US into military action one way or another)
If anyone wants to read a great article about what happened to America's institutions, I recommend Francis Fukuyama's America in Decay [1]. His "end of history" argument seems very premature given what's happened since he wrote that, but most of his other work is spot on.
[0] I certainly don't agree that these policies are beneficial in aggregate, as they result in international hostility, the things Snowden revealed, etc. It is, however, a thing that government does provide for the monied elites.
[1] https://cf.linnbenton.edu/artcom/social_science/clarkd/uploa...
This is conflating power and wealth. When one has too much power, one is able to seek rents. Often this takes the form of government-sponsored monopolies. However, one's security costs increase faster than one's wealth, so wealthy people have an incentive to capture the government and outsource their security costs. This is actually contrary to private property norms as it socializes costs that are properly born by the private entity.
> This is why those with the most private property can essentially do as they please;
This is absolutely backwards, the rich have more money, this incurs benefits and drawbacks. For example, they have much more to lose in the event they are found liable for anything.
> the benefits they derive from their private property are disproportionately high compared to the cost that society incurs protecting their private property.
That would be an argument for expanding the scope of private property (because we are able to get disproportionately more benefit at disproportionately lower social cost).
> For instance, the workload that the government is tasked with to protect private property of these elites at home (e.g. the large amount of police resources that need to be available for large tech campuses or in rich areas)
One imagines that the benefits of a low-crime society might be extended to people who don't live on a tech campus or in the Hamptons.
> Either through taxes or government stakeholdership in corporations
Its probably best to spend more time identifying the problem before we grasp for solutions.
> has worked hand in hand with the elites to steal and pillage the private property of the common man (e.g. how Warren Buffet's secretary pays a higher tax percentage that he does).
I agree, working professionals are taxed to death. Taxes on wages and salaries should be lowered to match the ltcg rate.
> Things are getting worse in the US as public institutions are eroding or becoming more kleptocratic
Have you considered this to be a weakness of the way those institutions are structured?
> some libertarian wet dream of privatization of everything is the answer (private military and private firefighters come to mind
Tbf its probably better to have these institutions working for the people who enjoy their services and pay for them, rather than the current system.
I can see no evidence that this is the case, just based on that comment.
Fairness, comradery, and equity are enough.
If 2020 taught me anything, it's that society can come close to the brink pretty quickly. I thought there was an inevitable trend toward freedom, but recently think it's perilous. We need ideas to flow to create a more distributed, less unequal, world, and we need it now. We need to unshackle the people.
If anyone is working toward this, let me know how I can help (including funding). I'm supporting things like SciHub/LibGen and the like, but we need far far more organizers fighting to #EndIp, #AbolishCopyright, #AbolishPatents.
Trolls feel free to reply with the rote lies about how these laws make any sense. Anyone with a conscience doing something about it please get in touch and let me know how I can help!