[breck]

Go further.

If you model ideas mathematically, you will see that societies plagued with IPDD (https://breckyunits.com/ipdd.html) will become extinct, because they prolong the lifespan of bad ideas, and those with intellectual freedom, where bad ideas rapidly evolve into good ideas, will rise to the top of the food chain. The equation is simple: ETA! (https://breckyunits.com/eta.html)

Question whether we should even have a concept of "licenses" (hint: we shouldn't). Look up "freedom licenses", which "freed" African Americans used to have to carry around in the 1800's. Think about how future generations will look at us for having a concept of "licenses on ideas". Think about the natural progression of automatic licenses on ideas (copyright act of 1976), to breathing: there is no reason not to require "licenses" to breathe, given that you exhale carbon dioxide molecules just as you exhale "copyrighted" information.

[rileymat2]

Is there any evidence that the equations in the blog post model the real world?

I ask, because these intellectual property protections are intended to incentivize creation. If that incentive overwhelms these models of information sharing and testing frictions then the model is incomplete.

[breck]

> because these intellectual property protections are intended to incentivize creation

Judge something not by what people say it does, but by what it actually does.

> If that incentive overwhelms these models of information sharing and testing frictions then the model is incomplete.

Agreed. But try as I might, I can't find any way theoretically or empirically to model copyrights and patents that show a positive impact on innovation.

Nature's survival of the fittest already provides near infinite incentive to innovate.

Now, I think patents and copyrights had a positive side-effect effect in the early days of the United States because it created a centralized library in the District of Columbia containing all of the latest information across the fledgling nation. But with the Internet, we don't even need that anymore. All the other parts of those laws are harmful and a drain on innovation.

Look at what happened with Windows/Crowdstrike-ultimately another harm caused by closed source, under-evolved "IP protected" ideas. Ironically Microsoft calls Windows their "Intellectual Property" when collecting money, but when that IP harms people, suddenly it's not their property.

> Is there any evidence that the equations in the blog post model the real world?

Depends on where you live. If you live in America, evidence is all around you. :)

But here is some hard data, thousands of programming languages ranked by languages most used to build other languages (which gives an objective measure of idea quality):

https://pldb.io/lists/explorer.html#columns=rank~name~id~app...

Utterly dominated by open source langs. Closed source, IP ones are headed for extinction.

[surfingdino]

I think you are conflating copyright with patents. Licenses and other forms of intellectual property protection exist so that those who control means of production and distribution pay those who have ideas, or produce creative output.

[bediger4000]

I agree they're different, and different still from trademarks, but the common thing is to conflate it all under "Intellectual Property", isn't it?

I'm deeply suspicious of this conflation. I think it's done on purpose, in bad faith, for nefarious reasons.

[llamaimperative]

Why on earth would IP keep bad ideas around? You're free to make a better idea and let it compete in the market, since by being better it'd definitionally be different.

[iczero]

Let's say someone patents, idk, Client-Side Decoration (CSD). People like it, surely, because people use it. Unfortunately, there is drastically reduced space to innovate because nobody else can use that idea anymore. Expecting the patent holder to innovate has proven to be a bad assumption in part because IPR means they have no competition in that space anyways. The idea stays bad because nobody else can make it better.

[llamaimperative]

So people like it but it's bad? How exactly are you defining bad?

[tempfile]

For the same reason any accumulation of capital allows bad ideas to hang around. You can operate at a temporary loss to weed out new competitors, you can intimidate newcomers with frivolous legal action, you can leverage network effects, you can lobby for regulation that makes it hard for competitors to start up...