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.
15 years is plenty of time, then everything needs to be released into the public domain.