“it was made up to support and safeguard author’s living”. That’s not really true. It least in the US, it was made up to promote the useful arts and sciences. Incentivizing authors is a means to that end. If incentivizing corporations achieves those ends as well, it would seem to be consistent with the original purpose. Of course, there are probably valid arguments that corporate ownership of IP doesn’t always promote the useful arts and sciences (for example patent trolls).

"patent trolls" is an unhelpful term because it is in the eye of the beholder.

Was Amazon being a patent troll patenting single-click-to-purchase? Was Apple a troll in patenting Swipe to Unlock? They were using those patents in their products.

On the other hand is the Tolkien Estate patent trolls? They're not producing anything new.)

If I have a dozen patents, and some company wants to buy them from me, is that any different to me selling my company? Surely I can sell my assets?

The root issue are not "patent trolls". Being sued by Amazon is no less disruptive than by Trolls r US.

The root issue is the nature of the patents being issued.

The root of copyright issues are (mostly) not about actual copyright, but the length of copyright.

Fair points.

Usually they're called NPEs, non practicing entities and differentiated because their use of patents is to use them to extract tolls rather than to build things.

Which isn't to say that established players don't also use them to create moats around technology of interest, or that the nature of certain patents doesn't lend them to abuse. They could, for example, require that the thing which makes the patent 'novel' also be 'patentable subject matter' for example, rather than letting one patent some novel software running on a non-novel computer and meet the standard one piece at a time.

Also I wasn't aware that Tolkien or his estate had any patents. Copyrights, surely, but patents? That's surprise me.

> The root of copyright issues are (mostly) not about actual copyright, but the length of copyright.

The other issues are getting worse over time. Lack of first sale doctrine. DRM preventing fair use. That Aereo thing where you're not allowed to rent a preconfigured antenna and recorder from someone else.

Yes, very few works need more than the original 7 years in order for them to get a sufficient return to make them economically viable.

I wonder if that applies to novels that don’t become bestsellers? A book that simply does okay. People buy it, never a ton of them, but always a few, every few days, for a long time. No idea what the answer is, just something that popped into my head.

When/where was it 7?

IIRC under the Statute of Anne, it was 7 (plus 7 if you paid again).

It seems like a good balance between private monopoly and public interest for the shirts of artistic works copyright protects.

Statue of Anne was 14+14. I'm not sure exactly if/how payment worked.

>Was Amazon being a patent troll patenting single-click-to-purchase? //

Just on that example. I think Amazon were fine to get a monopoly (in USA) on commercial implementation of one-click. But realistically it's worth a couple of years at most of monopoly for something which arises naturally out of the progress of the web, which Amazon rode the wave of (and contributed to). Locking that up for 20 years doesn't serve society; it's clearly anti-democratic [ie against the best interests of society as a whole] to have that extended term for business methods/software.

In this case it's trivial to work around, but that's not true of all 'small idea' patents.

This is if course my personal opinion, unrelated to my employment.

> I think Amazon were fine to get a monopoly (in USA) on commercial implementation of one-click.

But who benefits from that other than Amazon when, as you say, it arose naturally. Does anyone think one-click purchase is something that would never have existed if not for Amazon?

It was created to allow the United States to make money printing books without paying for them but not allowing other countries to print their books.

Later it was expanded to keep poor countries and people from affording medicine.

Reading on the history of copyright would be a good start before perpetuating misconceptions.

The idea of copyright predates the United States. The English ‘Statute of Anne’ of 1710 is typically cited as the first modern expression.

In the world of copyright and patents, there's a before and an after the USA. Anyone trying to make a different case must be trying to fool themselves.

This. People (naively or dishonestly) think because the text is "To promote the progress of science and useful arts", that it must be the case it does this. Powerful people wouldn't lie, would they?

In reality (c)opywrong and patent law does the opposite. It promotes the collection of money and power to the 1% to the detriment of the progress of science and useful arts.

How does that story fit with USA being 100 years later to the Paris Convention?

Disney and Electronic Arts employs hundreds of thousands of employees that gets to enjoy their salary. They are paid through the IP. How is that not IP working as intended?

The employees toil to create amazing stuff and receive a pittance compared to what it's worth. Most of the profit goes to execs who have had no hand in creating anything of value.

Communism very popular these days on Hacker News; it's like being back in the 1960s at the start of the computer revolution, or on Slashdot in the very OSS days. You'll all turn and become capitalists eventually.

None of my comment suggests communism. Plus, your comment doesn't seem to add anything meaningful to the conversation as best as I can tell.

Yeah its an age/experience thing.

start a company why don't you, being an exec sounds simple enough

None of my comment suggests that it's easy. And more to the point, being hard doesn't mean that execs do good in the world.

Is this comment meant to say that not having IP laws would somehow assist in fixing this problem?

Yeah, about that - Disney decided years ago it doesn't need to pay authors royalties it legally owes them.

https://www.writersmustbepaid.org/

War is an ultimate employer of soldiers and workers that make things for war effort, does it therefore mean that we should continue wars or that all these people would otherwise be unemployed?

Without copyright, and especially century long Mickey Mouse copyright, it's easier to open your own smaller amusement park that competes with Disneyland, this will employ a lot of people outside LA or Orlando area. Plus I will still buy my games and movies from reputable sources that are fair to content creators. If some poor college students can't afford that, maybe it's good they can get a break.