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by 9dev
921 days ago
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I respectfully disagree. The world is so reliant on the way digital goods ownership is set up, you can't just revoke this without extremely far-reaching consequences. If you take that away, I do not see how you automatically strengthen scarce property rights – you're merely destabilising the economy with hope that it reassembles itself into something more aligned with your own ideology. Throwing patents, intellectual property, and copyright into a single bucket and simply label it "bad" doesn't help to improve the current situation, neither does abolishing it. The way I see it, there's definitely reason in protecting ideas and the result of creative work, even if that result is a sequence of bytes. Society would be worse off if we didn't have any incentive to produce art, or software. That's not to say the current situation is ideal – far from it. But I strongly believe your suggestion would lead to chaos, and it's dangerous to go there. |
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I made this case in the grandparent post. To reiterate: the presence of scarce and non-scarce property rights creates a contest between two things that we pretend to be the same thing (property) but which follow different dynamics (scarce vs non-scarce). Government must rule that one dominates the other. In the developed world, the way this plays out is that government rules non-scarce rights to overrule scarce rights. Removing the non-scarce rights would therefore lead to a strengthening of scarce rights.
> Throwing patents, intellectual property, and copyright into a single bucket and simply label it "bad"
But that is not what I did. I made a first-principles argument, and then supplied examples as a form of illustration.
You have quoted "bad" here as though I said it, though I did not.
> Society would be worse off if we didn't have any incentive to produce art, or software.
(heavy edit)
There was incentive to create in the pre-scarce world. Large bodies of great work were produced in theatre, chamber music, literature, sculpture, painting in a scarce-rights world with much lower GDP, lower living standards and no copyright. Bach and Beethoven, Shakespeare and Chekov - these people all operated in scarce-rights regimes. People routinely copied their works. That we have these works is evidence of their incentive.
The licenses that sit behind Linux and similar systems go to great lengths to cancel protections given by copyright. Yet great work is done on these systems. The incentive must be there.
Non-scarce rights create incentive against creation. They discourage remixing of existing work, and they create legal barriers against entry into fields that are affected by patents.