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> (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. |
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.