[iSnow]

>Sorting out intellectual property and ownership is _the_ 21st century problem

Uhm, no. Only for the HN crowd and maybe open source.

There are a lot more and more pressing problems that have to do with things like the environment, food production, reproduction, migration and democracy vs. corporatism vs. ideology.

[rayiner]

It's profoundly important to the U.S. as a whole. Creation of IP is the last thing that's going to be automated by robots. It's already been tremendously resistant to production being exported to China and India. We're already at the point where the primary product of the U.S. is IP in various forms (Apple designs the computers but they're manufactured in China).

[bediger4000]

What do you mean by "IP"? If it's "intellectual property" that strikes me (a non-lawyer) as a particularly vague and ill-defined concept. I personally find the idea of owning an idea to be risible: historically, important things have been invented or discovered multiple times, sometimes clearly independently. So, why should I as a citizen finance some monopolies that will be economically detrimental to me and to society as a whole? Seriously. I'm not pulling chains here. Economists are almost 100% against monopolies (although they often differ on what constitutes a monopoly), and "IP" is a state-supported monopoly. Why should we subject ourselves to it?

[jacobr1]

> Why should we subject ourselves to it?

The traditional reason is to grant incentive for its creation in the first place. One primary example has been medical advances. With the benefit of a (temporary) monopoly on the sales of a new drug, the company has an incentive to create it in the first place. Perhaps we wouldn't have as many life saving advances without IP protection. A secondary reason is that it requires public disclosure. One alternative to patent protection is to keep a production method a trade secret. So companies, if they are sufficiently secretive, could have effective if not legally enforced monopolies due to such secrets. So is it worth the tradeoff of having IP protection?

COST: a time-limited monopoly; limited incremental innovation on derivatives of the protected work during the lifetime of the protection.

BENEFIT: potentially more innovative goods and services are created to begin with; the means and methods behind these innovations are publicly documented for future replication or derivative work .

I'm think it is worth the tradeoff both for copyright protection and patents in general. But the specific laws are certainly not optimal as currently written and enforced by the courts. Durations for both patents and copyright are too long. Plenty of things that are patentable should not be, due to them being too obvious, trivial, or just not appropriate for protection.

Also the remedy for infringement has multiple options. You could allow general infringement, at statutory royalty rates. I think Canada has experimented with this for copyright, and the US as standard (but private) arrangements for the licensing of music. You could require a fraction of any profits. These provide the monopoly rents, but not a monopolization of production and derivatives. We are still learning what the optimal tradeoffs are for society. I hope we have more experimentation on regulatory regimes to identify the best compromises.

[bediger4000]

The traditional reason is to grant incentive for its creation in the first place.

Most certainly, that's the nominal, and even in the USA, constitutional basis of copyright and patents. But the actual implementation over the last 100 years seems to have veered away from creating incentives, and into creating something naively akin to ownership, with state enforcement.

I hope we have more experimentation on regulatory regimes

Based on the CAFC's decision here, and it's history, we're only going to experiment with "more" and "stricter" regimes. We've (the USA) never really experimented with loosening "IP" monopolies, despite data and logic pointing towards shorter monopolies as closer to optimum.

I'd also have to take exception the "pharmacy has benefitted from long-lasting monopolies". That's probably true simplistically (When was the last time Smith Klein Glaxo didn't turn a huge profit?) but in the manner of creating tons of medicines for The Rest of Us, it seems to have failed. India and some African countries actually allow infringing compounds, because the price of authentic compounds is set high. Also, the people of the USA pay way more for medications than most other countries. This whole topic is subject to argument, but certainly pharmacy patents relate to high prices and unavailability.

[rayiner]

I mean "IP" in the broadest sense. The iPhone is "designed by Apple in California" but everything is "made in China." Whatever information flows from California to China to enable that is IP. As to your second point: having a monopoly over a thing is different than having a monopoly over a market. All property rights are state-supported monopolies. The essence of trade is exchange of monopoly rights as to things. So it doesn't make any sense to say economists are categorically against monopolies.

Existing IP regimes aren't perfect, but appropriate protections for IP are fundamental to the prosperity of the United States. You're way better off as a Californian in a world where Chinese people have to pay tons of money to California for something they build domestically.

[bediger4000]

Whatever information flows from California to China to enable that is IP.

Congratulations, you've just blurred the issue beyond repair. Now, not only do I have no idea what "IP" is, other than some vague "information" (bits and bytes? phrases on paper? verbal instructions? URLs? methods of production?), I have no idea how to tell if some particular piece of information is "stolen" or "not stolen". I have to go ask someone (who?) to check.

My basic contention is that considering ideas or concepts or math as property, warps society beyond what most of us would like, and therefore, we should do away with the concept of "IP". We'll have to figure out something other than an "IP regime" to create appropriate incentives, but the possible disincentives from just about any "IP regime" are too bad to actually implement those "IP regimes".

[rayiner]

It's not a blurry concept. If you're a company in China, you've got aluminum and milling machines. You can import PCBs from Taiwan and SOCs from Korea. What else do you need to make an iPhone? The intangible stuff that's made in California: PCB layouts, machining processes and specs, CPU/GPU designs, firmware, software, branding. That's all IP, protected by a web of copyright, patent, trademark, trade secret, and contractual rights.

To tie back to the original point by 'colechristensen: the U.S. is rapidly becoming a country where people spend all day working on products the end result of which is intangible. As production of tangible goods becomes commoditized because of robots and 3D printing, it's going to be the production of intangible goods that's going to give countries' competitive advantages in the global marketplace.

[mattlutze]

As we move away from jobs-as-sustenance and toward a new social model where sustenance and income come from a broader range of sources that do not so directly correlate to your time spent working... the respect for and ownership of intellectual property may very well be a central tenant to life in modern society.

It's not just about lawyers and multinationals dukeing it out.

[jaredklewis]

Yea, but I would guess software will be pretty helpful when solving those problems.

[colechristensen]

Which of those problems do you think doesn't already have a solution? If not, which of those do you think isn't a perpetual problem which has been around in some form or another since the dawn of human civilization?

Reorganizing the world's economy away from physical works to intellectual ones is an entirely new problem and will be on the scale of the industrial revolution.