[akg0]

> One answer is to say "they wouldn't!". From there, you have to ask: would they still create? Probably, yes, but in a much more limited way.

We're already limited by IP. The proposition of IP is that the best way to encourage people to engage in creative works is to prohibit them from engaging in creative works that involve other people's creative works.

That seems ridiculous at face value to me. That's not to say I think it's universally false - reality is often annoyingly counter-intuitive that way - but it only makes sense when there's a dearth of people able and willing to engage in creative pursuits, or when disseminating ideas and works is prohibitively expensive. Both of those conditions may have been true a century or even arguably two decades ago - but not today.

It does bring babies and bathwater to mind, though. In the name of encouraging creativity, we prohibit particular forms of creativity.

It'd be one thing if we had good reason to think that it continues to have its intended effect - but we don't. On the other hand, we have lots of examples of unintended, negative effects that inevitably come with trying to impedance-match a reality full of cheap technology that can quickly spread information with a system that attempts to limit access "for your own good".

> It seems fairly logical to me that without IP, you'd have fewer "IP goods",

True. Strictly speaking, I don't think there would be any "IP goods" per se, just technological goods. But I think most businesses wouldn't be affected much at all - I could see, for example, a software vendor like Oracle continuing to do almost exactly what it does today, indefinitely, even in the absence of IP. Well, sans a bunch of lawsuits.

(Not to get OT, but inevitably someone's gonna ask "what stops their customers from buying 1 license and deploying on 10,000 servers?" Nothing, or maybe some sort of DRM - but that's not the point. Ultimately, access to updates would be Oracle's "teeth" for discouraging that behavior among their customers. So they'd fire a good subset of the legal department, and instead hire more developers to write new features in order to retain customers. Sounds like more resources allocated to creative, productive work to me.)

> although having actual numbers to plug in, somehow, would doubtless improve the discussion a great deal.

This is the biggie. IP has been around much longer than the transistor, and given the enormous potential upsides, it seems obvious to me that we should have gone on an IP 'sabbatical' maybe 10 years ago, just to see what happens. After all, it's entirely possible that the overall creative output of our society wouldn't be affected at all, leaving "just" the advantage of ridding ourselves of one more legal labyrinth.

But the best case is much more exciting - what if creative output rises dramatically? I certainly don't think we can rule it out without giving it a shot.

And sure, there's a worst-case too; maybe every job related to IP simply disappears and we end up with a generation of college grads with no jobs. Fine, it can be undone. I'm not morally opposed to IP - well, I guess I do find it distasteful - but I'm definitely morally opposed to wrecking the economy. No one's suggesting we just say "screw the baby" if it turns out IP is a good thing.

But right now, we just don't know, and we should find out. On balance, it's absolutely worth trying - so why haven't we done it already? Not that I'm actually asking, we all know that there's a long and dreary list of mundane political and human-nature reasons why it hasn't happened, and won't be happening anytime soon.

But so it goes.

[davidw]

> (Not to get OT, but inevitably someone's gonna ask "what stops their customers from buying 1 license and deploying on 10,000 servers?" Nothing,

That's very germane. It means that they would earn significantly less money. 10,000 times less, in that particular instance, which is a lot.

Instead of being a 35 billion dollar company, they'd be a 3.5 million dollar company. That's enough to pay a team of, say, 10 engineers and a few other people, which is, uh, significantly different than the number of people they have now.

So you'd have to fire massive numbers of people at companies like Oracle. But not just them - think of all the scientists at drug firms. Their income would be right out the window too. Many best selling authors would have to work some sort of day job to earn money to live on, and thus would be able to write less. Movies? Maybe independent artsy ones done on a shoestring would survive. Performed music might do ok, but recording would probably be an afterthought to market shows. And people like Brian Wilson, who are the studio genius types, but kind of shy and not big on the live thing? Out with them too.

I don't think your numbers add up to 'more creative output', myself.

[akg0]

> Instead of being a 35 billion dollar company, they'd be a 3.5 million dollar company.

So if I'd said 100,000 servers, you'd argue that Oracle would be a $350,000 company, with maybe two employees? Heaven forbid they be 8-core servers (assuming per-core licensing) - I guess their workforce would be a leg.

It was a contrived example, and your extrapolation that Oracle's income would fall in direct proportion to how many servers their product was deployed to without their permission does not follow. In reality, their business would proceed almost exactly as it does today: they'd make a pitch, give a quote for however many servers the client needs, and many hours of consulting later, they'd bill the client. Their enforcement mechanism would be continued access to expertise and updates. Except when things get ugly and lawyers get called, this is what already happens.

I'm not familiar with Oracle's practices, but I think it's safe to assume that the vast majority of software vendors already deal with non-payment by stopping services before they go the legal route - if they go that way at all, given how expensive it can be for the far more numerous non-Oracles.

> It means that they would earn significantly less money.

This is incorrect, for the same reason that millions of song downloads don't actually suggest untold billions would have gone to artists in the absence of the downloads. It's just not true. People or companies that need a software vendor's expertise will pay for it; that fact stays true whether IP is perpetual, eternal, and physically impossible to violate, or totally absent.

Naturally, we went straight to the OT part. Fun.

Pharma is the other big IP problem that always comes up. And, yeah, the current business model wouldn't work, and there are tough problems - drug development is expensive, clinical trials are expensive, basic research is expensive (although already largely publicly funded, yet the fruits somehow end up privately owned again, but that's further OT...), and no one is willing to take that kind of risk unless they can get millions of relatively well-off consumers (read: middle-class Americans) to get their insurance companies to pay large amounts for the finished product for maybe 15 years. So first question: Why not 30? 300? Perpetual? 3 months? What data do we have that patents are a good way of funding drug research, and that the current patent length is anywhere near optimal? Why should different drugs be restricted for roughly the same period of time? None of these questions can be answered today, because the fact that pharma is funded by IP is a historical accident, not some kind of finely-balanced common-good formula.

And let's take a different perspective: we have entities that 'everyone' - not really, but close enough for our purposes - pays into, who in turn pay pharma companies above-production-cost prices for high-initial-cost drugs.

It really resembles a privately-run taxation -> R&D system, except with highly perverse incentives like high marginal profits on each new prescription you can get signed up. It's no surprise, then, that so much of the funding (insurance premiums) goes to PR instead of R&D.

No one is suggesting that we do away with pharmaceutical research, or fire all the scientists. But I would like it if there was no longer an incentive to spend my premiums to convince other people that they should have their insurance companies fund another cycle of PR campaigns, with however much R&D can be squeezed in on the side. That's not going to change without fundamentally changing how pharma is funded, and if it's funded by high-price drugs that cover the expensive phases, no matter how you slice it, the perverse incentives remain.

It's a tough problem. And I'm not averse to just keeping pharma patents until we some something else figured out - but let's not pretend that because scientists today are funded by a messy, inefficient system, they must always be so funded.

> And people like Brian Wilson, who are the studio genius types, but kind of shy and not big on the live thing?

And? To quote Foreman (from House): "I've got an uncle. He can spit a cherry pit 50 yards. He's working part-time at a lube shop. Life isn't fair."

Let's not pretend that many "studio genius types" are able to make a living on it now; whether we're talking music/movies/art, studio, live or whatever, all kinds of talented people can't make a living of it, IP or no.

But you can't make the argument that their situation would be worse without IP; we've never experienced it. I think it's worth a trial run. If it's a disaster, lesson learned. But there's a significant chance that it would not be a disaster, and I think there would be a lot of very clear benefits to society.

[davidw]

> It was a contrived example, and your extrapolation that Oracle's income would fall in direct proportion to how many servers their product was deployed to without their permission does not follow.

Oracle's income is proportionate to the number of licenses people buy, with some revenue from services thrown in too. I don't know the percentages of each one in the total, but to state that drastically fewer licenses would not lead to much less revenue seems somewhat disconnected from reality.

> So first question: Why not 30? 300? Perpetual? 3 months?

Because, like I said, it's a compromise. We as a society pick a number that best balances the needs of IP producers and consumers. In theory. In practice, I don't think the numbers are ideal right now, and should be rebalanced. However, there's a big difference between some rejigging and throwing out the system in its entirety.

> And I'm not averse to just keeping pharma patents until we some something else figured out - but let's not pretend that because scientists today are funded by a messy, inefficient system, they must always be so funded.

Democracy is a messy, inefficient system too: it just happens to be better than the alternatives. If you don't have a superior system to propose, throwing out the existing one seems like a very ill-conceived experiment.