[mrep]

> As society, we seem to be ok with millennials fresh out of college making hundreds of thousands of $$$ a year for a bunch Javascript that allows people to share pictures of their butt with their friends BUT we are not ok with doctors who literally - save lives - getting paid according to their responsibilities?

Programmers only make that because the services they build are extremely scalable, profitable, and wanted by many driving up demand for programmers. Eventually, supply should drive down wages which is fair. I also don't mind doctors making good money but they should not be able to artificially constrain supply just so they can jack up their prices.

[zanny]

What gets me at the end of the day is that almost the entire institution that makes programming "valuable" is wholly fictitious and socially constructed. Without institutional international copyright and IP protection the vast majority of software produced would not generate nearly as much revenue per developer hour as it does today. The entire industry is basically an accident caused by greedy corporations extending copyright indefinitely for a century before the commoditization of computation happened and suddenly having the correct number could make you impossibly rich while you were given government protections of your exclusive ownership of said number.

When you look at the stock market and you see ludicrous P/E ratios on companies like Google and Amazon it must be acknowledged the only reason money sees them as being so valuable is because governments the world over have awarded them, through employee ingenuity or acquisition, exclusive permanent monopolies to millions of ideas enshrined in copyrights any of which could explode into an infinite money machine on any given Tuesday. Paired with their treasure troves of harvested data on people they are the largest entities in existence not for the actual real world value they produce but for the untenable position they now occupy with the force of the state and international trade standing behind them to preserve their position as the total arbiters of information.

Its really gross, and I have to live every day knowing that I largely do this (the programming, computers, tech, etc) on the back of a power structure enshrined and grown cancerous over centuries with the intent to exploit perpetual monopolies on ideas.

[mrep]

If everyone could copy your IP which is essentially free to do these days with computers, how would anyone make money creating IP which is the main driver of GDP growth? Would you prefer to live in a stagnating economy while every other countries citizens gets richer than you everyday?

[adrianN]

IP creators could still make money from the first sale, or in a pay-what-you-want scheme.

[Negitivefrags]

What copyrights do Google and Amazon rely on to stay a monopoly?

Actually, it feels like with everything hosted server side these days there really isn't a lot of benefit to IP protection to tech companies. Media companies yes, tech companies not really.

Even if all of googles source code was stolen today, and it was legal for people to use it, would that really change anything for google?