Gross simplification. The simple fact you reason and write about this question is a direct consuequence of the free availability of IP to you : you learned to write, to compute, to think with books and a free incredibly huge flow of ideas.
You're basically seeing intellectual production as a thing that should be monetized. Most of IP is free fortunately.
> Plus IP expires.
Unless armies of legal teams make sure it doesn't.
I'm always surprised by the fact that many people advocate for free competing markets. But if you remove IP, then it's totally free competition : nobody gets the protection of IP, all players are on the same page. Then all of sudden "investors" don't want to invest anymore because there's not protection. Either those are not very brave, either they're not interested in making the world a better plus but rather interested in winning money because, hey we had a great idea, we _deserve_ to profit on it...
Removal of IP here means that you've enforced a penalty against innovators and creators, and baked incentives for grifting and leeching straight into the system. The system we have right now is flawed, but the remove all IP argument is even worse.
I'll also pre-empt the "But research is government funded" side tangent, getting the drug from a proof of concept/academic study to something that can actually be used is horrendously expensive, and this bit is completely in the domain of private industry. And if you think academia is going to replace that in this no-IP world, you might want to look into how the academia -> industry pipeline actually works.
On a more software side angle, I've found it interesting that the biggest anti-IP people I know also bemoan the general move over to SaaS.
I think it's also worth asking why the available funding for innovation is almost exclusively in the hands of capitalists in the first place. Do they simply have superior business acumen, or are there protections / rent-seeking behaviors at play here?
The problem here is that people love to pick at the current system, but ignore the flaws of their much treasured alternative.
The problem here is that people also love to defend the current system, while actively prohibiting alternatives from ever taking root.
Saying there's no good reason for IP rights because lawyers can get their way by brute force, is like saying there's no good reason for anyone to ever eat pizza because the pizza place makes bad pizza. Please separate the implementation from the idea.
It's fair to argue that in our current court system and regulatory environment that removing IP protections would be better (i think that's debatable), but it seems intellectually dishonest to say there are no good reasons for IP at the conceptual level.
You have to actually prove that research would slow down but your hypothetical scenarios are not proof.
I can just as easily assert that investment and research would happen with or without temporary exclusive legal rights as. Market forces still push for improvement even without exclusivity.
If you think this is subjective, let me ask you think: you have a popular YouTube channel, your content requires paying writers, actors, VFX teams and editors. Bunch of other people copy your content freely and legally and get most of the ad revenue.
You protest: you made this content, you paid for it. Please just link to me, not the copycats. Response "we can just as easily assert that you'd continue making videos anyway with or without other people copying you."
Kind of tonedeaf isn't it?
Look, eventually all our jobs will be producing IP. We'll have IP schematics to prints 3D printers which prints other 3D printers, which print robots which do all the work. I'm simplifying but basically that's the future of jobs. No one cares about your muscles, they only care about your brain. So, to say IP deserves no rights in the long-term means basically no one has jobs, and we have no economy.
3D printers is a bad example by the way, as one of the most successful 3D printing companies works completely opensource: https://github.com/prusa3d
Why do people still pay them a large sum for their printer when they can build one themselves or buy a cheap clone off of Aliexpress?
Why would YouTube pay ad revenue to a "bunch of other people" in a hypothetical world where YouTube could freely and legally host a copy of the content themselves, and take all the ad revenue for themselves?
They have an incentive to pay something the creator (if they think that doing so would motivate them to create more content, and hence lead to more ad revenue in the future), but certainly not to a bunch of random people uploading the same content.
You do realize if YouTube alone protected copyright, we'd have a NotYouTube clone setup within minutes where the copies and ads will go to, or not?
We have governments for this stuff, so we don't have to play whack-a-mole with copycats all over the internet and the world.
2. No that argument is still silly. It does not work for the same reason: it assumes no agency on part of economic actors. The only way your hypothetical "NotYouTube" could stay in business vs. YouTube is by adding enough value that they actually get ad revenue. If people decide to advertise on "NotYouTube", to the extent that it is profitable to run "NotYouTube", then "NotYouTube" will have the exact same incentive to motivate content creators by sharing part of their ad revenue with them. The argument is precisely that these copycats are a net positive: coordinating against them (playing whack-a-mole) is a net negative, with or without governments.
Well, they have the same content as YouTube for starters. So all they need is a slightly sexier or faster app, and they're done.
> "NotYouTube" will have the exact same incentive to motivate content creators by sharing part of their ad revenue with them.
"NotYouTube" doesn't have content creators. Why would they. They have YouTube's content.
See, the part you keep missing in your analysis is that without IP rights, NotYoutube doesn't need original content, full stop. It just needs to copy/paste YouTube's content. They don't have to share ad revenue with anyone.
You really need to think through the entire chain of events that'll unfold if we had no IP rights. Creators will no longer be someone you need to deal with. They're just the gullible idiots who made something on their own, for others to just take it and profit from it.
In a world without IP rights, content is worthless. So who would bother producing it? Let's figure that out. The only way for content producers to profit would be product placement deals. However the product placement should be inseparable from the content, because in a world without IP rights, anyone can just cut out the ads and sponsored messages from your content.
So what's the conclusion here? All content will be just... ads. Not videos WITH ads. But the videos themselves will be ads. Ads for products you can sell, as those are the only thing you can sell for money in a world without IP rights. Probably also political propaganda, as politicians can pay for that as well, and then embezzle it from the budget. That's going to be all of it. Wow, I just got sad imagining that.
YouTube is not just an app, it's a network that can distribute content along the lines of "200 million videos watched, 65k new videos uploaded per day", it's also the people who moderate it, it's also the people who market it, uptime and reliability, etc. And you'd have to beat YouTube on every single one of these to get at even a substantial fragment of those precious ad dollars.
Notice that your hypothetical "NotYouTube" does not have _any_ advantage over actual-YouTube in a world without IP. It's in the business of connecting advertisers to potential customers, just like YouTube, and to be able to do that, they need content that people watch. And hence, it has an incentive to support the creation of such content. Especially so if it becomes the market leader (by having a slightly sexier app, or larger reach, or less obtrusive ads, or better recommendations, or a nicer privacy policy, some other appeal^1): with that advantage, more people will watch the new content on their website than elsewhere, so it will be able to get more ad revenue from hosting it than its competitors.
There might be
> You really need to think through the entire chain of events that'll unfold if we had no IP rights.
Agreed. We should be especially careful not to: 1. assume that Econ 101 would also cease to apply, and that anyone would be able to make money by spinning up YouTube clones. If your dystopian vision was correct, Wikipedia would have been outcompeted by one of its ad-supported mirrors long ago.
^1 Note: All of these are QoL improvements for the users of the services. As long as there are many more content consumers than content creators (and there is overlap between the two categories), this may constitute a further argument against IP rights.
Original content is an incentive because only the producer can host it. That's enforced by RIGHTS.
Without rights, if YouTube produces it, it ends up on NotYouTube. If NotYouTube produces, it ends up on YouTube. No rights, no original content. There's no incentive. You keep saying the incentive is so people go to the site to watch a particular video. But nothing keeps that video on that one site. IP rights do that currently.
If what you say is right, how far has ThePirateBay gone to produce original content? Oh that's right, they just take Hollywood content and ads flow just fine. That's the future you're fighting for.
No, that's not what I'm saying, and I don't know what gave you that idea. The phrase "original content" never even appeared in my comments!
People visit to online video platforms to watch videos. If there are no interesting videos, people don't visit online video platforms: they go and do something else with their time. And if people don't visit your online video platform, operators of online video platforms lose money, and go out of business. Consequently, operators of online video platforms have an incentive to ensure that interesting videos get made. This is true even when all videos are available on all the platforms. Same principle: one of my siblings operates a rural hotel, and regularly contributes to a fund promoting tourism in the region. Doing this is a net positive for her revenue, even though some (most!) of the tourists will not stay in that specific hotel when they visit the region, and some might stay in hotels that did not contribute to any such fund.
> If what you say is right, how far has ThePirateBay gone to produce original content?
TPB has to operate illegally, has an order of magnitude fewer visitors, and two orders of magnitude smaller revenue. They are not in the position to fund substantial original content, and those who accepted their money would risk prosecution. Despite all of that, TPB did fund a limited number of art projects in the past [1].
> Oh that's right, they just take Hollywood content and ads flow just fine. That's the future you're fighting for.
Heartbreaking injustice. No comment.
Your hypothetical scenarios rely on perpetuating the current ways to monetize but again, that isn't the goal. New ways would surface. The world would certainly be different but nothing about your arguments convince the reader that the world would be worse.
You invest to produce IP, to you this still results in "IP has no value by default".
So I guess investing to buy a house, also results in "this house has no value by default" by that same logic.
If you plant a crop of wheat on your field this season, your brother cannot also plant a crop of barley there.
When you ride your bicycle to work for the day, your neighbour cannot ride the same bicycle to the gym at midday.
The quality of scarceness does not come from law, it is inherent.
Through owning your house, you get to decide what goes on there and have the use of it.
IP does not work that way because there is no inherent scarcity. A million and one people can listen to the same music track, and the first listener loses no value from its use by the other million.
If I live alone in a big house with 5 rooms, I could host at least 10-15 people there. They would surely rather live in that nice house, and not on the street.
What causes that scarcity that I live alone in a big house, while homeless people roam the streets? Property rights.
Property rights cause scarcity way before "natural scarcity" kicks in. To think otherwise is to lie to yourself.
The reason we can't rely just on natural scarcity is because it reduces us to living like animals. Rights protection, in balance, is what allows society to rise above a pile of people consuming everything to scarcity and filling everything to capacity, with no ability to take a long-term view other mere existence.
Would it still be a nice house if 10-15 people with no kinship were crammed into it?
We can see from the way that people chose to spend and live that most people regard privacy as important to their idea of home.
"What causes that scarcity that I live alone in a big house, while homeless people roam the streets? Property rights."
No, scarcity is inherent, as explained earlier.
With your home example, the land itself is scarce. Somebody has invested to build and maintain the building. The house would quickly be ruined and stripped if not for care and property protections.
"Rights protection, in balance, is what allows society to rise above a pile of people consuming everything to scarcity and filling everything to capacity, with no ability to take a long-term view other mere existence."
At the start of the thread, you were using the language of real property to argue for IP. But here, you reveal that you are in fact opposed to real property.
You're currently arguing in favor of artificial scarcity through property rights. Are you sure that's your thesis. /s
> No, scarcity is inherent, as explained earlier.
There's nothing "inherent" in having the right to keep those 10-15 people away from your nice house.
I think you're so used to having the right of property, you can't even realize none of this is inherent. Rights, laws and law enforcement gave you that.
Without this artificial scarcity, there would be zero homeless people. And there would also be zero people owning houses.
But I'm sure nice houses will just keep being built anyway. /s
> At the start of the thread, you were using the language of real property to argue for IP. But here, you reveal that you are in fact opposed to real property.
I'm not opposed to real property at all. I'm just showing you what a world without property rights looks like. You seem to not like it. QED.
If there is no protection for intellectual property, its not the listener who loses utility, its the owner of the intellectual property who would like to be rewarded for his work.
That's called a university. Such institutions are responsible for the vast majority of technical advances.
People who are looking at making this thing then get scared of investing in the development of the product and then we're back to no investment.
I've literally seen this with my own eyes. A friend of mine is one of these guys who has a 3D printer and thinks about what to invent all day. He also spends a lot of time looking up patents and tosses out ideas that he thinks will cause a legal mess. It's a shame because I think we might be at a point where we need more people executing than dreaming up ideas.
I don't really agree with that argument - 'real evidence' is always elusive - at some point we always have to do thought experiments - but I think you need to go a bit deeper. Your examples assume the business model of current copy right related businesses - it is obvious that in a world without copy rights they would not function, but that does not mean that we would not get the things that those businesses produce - they could be produced in other business models.
So, the only defense for IP is "it creates more value for society than the alternative". If we look into it, and the alternative is better (I don't know), the inventor should loss their privileges.
IP is not a right, it's a monopoly, a privilege given by law, and can be changed by law if judged not convenient anymore.
People like to say "you can't actually steal IP, you get to keep yours". Of course you can steal IP, by using it or redistributing it without compensating the creator, you reduce the value of their IP. You stole from them by taking part of the value of the IP for yourself, robbing THEM from having it.
Scenario: an inventor invests 10 million for a product and makes 20 million in sales. He goes to invest the 10 million profit in his next invention.
Alternate scenario: an inventor invests 10 million for a product and makes 1 million in sales, because competitors use his IP for free and saturated the market. Inventor goes bankrupt.
Call it anything you want, but to me the competitors stole $19 million from the inventor. Yes, we can't predict the future, so it's harder to argue hypothetical situations. But seriously can't we put 2+2 together?
Plus IP expires. It's not like patents and so on forever stay the property if someone. Eventually they become available to everyone in all their documented and archived glory at the patent office.