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The benefit is to provide incentive for designers to create original products. Essentially in exchange for bearing the costs and risks of creating something original they are rewarded with a small monopoly.

But extending copyright to ridiculous terms like 70 years past creators' death does little to achieve that goal. Also, as the article points out, extending the terms retroactively is just egregious - you cannot incentivize anyone in the past.

I personally feel that copyright and patents are useful but the terms should be much shorter than they are now (and they have a tendency to become longer with time).

The benefit to me, is that if I create a design, I can then make money from it.

Someone like Amazon can't just come along, copy and paste, and steal my idea and make money from it.

On a more general term, this would surely encourage originality, as there is a direct incentive not to copy

However I can see the other side of this argument, where big corporation buy up a large number of Design patents and use them to institute a tax on a certain item.

Yes, but designers are a minuscule part of society. Laws shouldn't benefit a few at the expense of the many. I guess incentivising originality is the benefit to the many. Are we better served by original furniture designs than by the ability to build our own furniture, however it may be shaped?

How exactly are you going to, you know, design that piece of furniture?

Are you going to go through the many years of schooling and/or decades of practical applied crafting that it takes to make a worthwhile piece of furniture?

So let's say you do that. You make yourself a really great piece, and your friends want to buy it because they didn't want to suffer the 10+ year path to making something worthwhile. You start selling to your friends, but then Walmart comes and makes a near replica at a quarter the price through economies of scale.

You wouldn't be upset? Would you make another piece of furniture? Would anyone else commit to 10+ years of craftsmanship to learn to do so?

This seems pretty straightforward.

No, it really isn't. The person who built that piece of furniture does not deserve an overall control of the design for the person's lifespan + 70 years. There is not a single rational justification for the 100+ year protection, nor should the society protect the few's livelihood when it can benefit everyone once the protection expires.

Switch your scenario the other way around because the reality is, the laws benefit larger companies more than the small indies. A lot of people in US didn't patent their ideas because it cost money to even start the patent process with a lawyer (you have to pay to research prior arts and so on).

Your scenario switch: A company built and patent that same furniture design and you as a small time designer can never sell that design with your own improvements on top of it for practically over 100 years. You cannot improve on a basic copyright unless you have permission. You can end up in a scenario where a massive amount of copyrighted designs are owned by a single company and there is nothing anyone can do for 100+ years.

The original purpose of the copyright (in US) was to push the society forward by promoting the arts and science by protecting the creator's work for a limited period of time, so everyone's motivated to create original stuff. Society suffers from extended protected terms. I'm okay with protecting the person's work for 10-20 years once the work is done, but there is no justification for 100+ years. I don't care if that person goes out of work in 20 years, it's not up to us to protect him for life.

In this age with ~7 billion of people, the right of one single person (or one company) over hundreds of millions of folks is no longer sane.

The real boogeyman in this legislation, i.e. the intended target as described in the article, seems to be China making cheap replicas. I think cheap replicas are probably a good thing. Why wouldn't I want the same thing but cheaper? It's not my job to ensure that local designers stay in business. Especially not if their design patents (which is what I'm asking about) can be reproduced accidentally.

For example, since clothing is much too necessary, universal, and functional, there are no patents or copyrights on clothing design. I think that's a good thing. The only thing you can do with clothing is trademarks, so as long as a similar-looking garment doesn't say it was made by some other designer, I don't see a problem with copying clothes. Why does furniture have design patents?

Design patents cover similar designs as the original, and there's no need to demonstrate that they were copied. How does punishing "independent invention" (legal term for utility patents) help us with design patents?

however my question is, how do they decide a piece of furniture does a task so much different and better than another that is warrants protection? There is just too much ambiguity in this interpretation. worse the whole is motivated by national protectionism and not trying to protect designers etc.

how about designers adopting to the new technology and selling personal use models that will work with standardized printers. The allure of most furniture is in the craftsmanship and I seriously doubt any 3d printer will be more that the quality of deck furniture and cheap deck furniture. Its like having your own IKEA furniture printer, minus the cushions and such.

whats next, limiting utensils and dinnerware? Chairs are generic, tables are too, your not going to put a designer out of business with your 3d printed chair.

Doctors are a minuscule part of society. I still benefit from their existence because I benefit from having access to the services they provide.

This law's still bullshit, of course.

Is there significant legislation that only benefits doctors at the expense of everyone else? Only legislation that's designed to protect their customers comes to mind right now.

Should they not be paid for their work?

I don't see how it is an advantage to allow people to rip off original designers, present it as their own work and charge a premium.

You know, maybe not.

We don't guarantee that effort equals reward anywhere else. You can go tilt against windmills all day, everyday, and find that either because nobody wanted them tilted (hah) or simply through poor execution, you can't make a living at it.

Why does some work deserve a hundred-year monopoly on anything like it, but other work does not?

Why does designing a chair deserve it, but designing a website UI (not the content) not?

And if building a Web UI out of standard parts (ie legs and cushions in the chair metaphor) does deserve protection, when do other people get to use a slider in combination with a dropdown, or whatever my minor innovation was? How long do I deserve to keep the world from using the standard toolbox just because I was first?

The process of invention, and the domain (chairs, programming, UX design) seem obscure and complex to the naive viewer and yet obvious to other practitioners. Unfortunately our system is based on asking people who do not work in the field what elements deserve protection.

That's what protected slide-to-unlock.

If their work is valuable, sure. If we can easily replicate accidentally (remember, design patents do not involve deliberate copying, but copyright does), then their work isn't valuable to us, since we are able to do it on our on accident.

And it appears that in this situation it's the designers pushing for this legislation that are charging a premium.

Because rarely is it really their own work, often just subtle variations on prior designs. And in practice... original designers do not win unless they are also backed by large companies. This is not about individual designers... this is about companies preventing individuals from copying them.

Every legal protection creates a possibility of costly litigation, including a possibility of a litigation that is costly despite the claim being bogus.

A design patent (and a regular patent, too) can be broad enough to cover all the obvious solutions to an obvious problem. Even if it covers things that existed before the plaintiff started working on things described in the design patent, it still costs a lot to defend against it even when the prior art is obvious.

tell us how you did it, and in exchange we promise not to compete with you for a while

That reasoning definitely hasa role in the history of patents, but I don't think it plays much of a modern role either in patent holders advocacy/lobby efforts or in proponent economists' reasoning. Instead, we have a more "modern" & market oriented rationale:

We promise not to compete with you for a while, and that should give you the incentive to create.

This works equally well as a rationale for copyrights. Either way, neither of these arguments can justify retroactive granting of IP rights of any kind. The value has already been created.

It is important to know the history, because patent and copyright laws are radically different. In order to understand the differences, we must know where the laws came from. The modern version that people say with "incentive to create" is intended to make people accept legislation for both patents and copyrights as inevitable in order to have innovation. It is a deliberate mind trick to persuade people to accept bad legislation, as this new furniture legislation might be.

What's the societal purpose of design patents?

It does give more incentive to produce original designs, but it also means that a well thought-out design won't be immediately copied. At least not exactly.

Lets use chairs as an example. One can't really put a utility patent on a chair, as they are commonplace. Most chairs are pretty standard designs (subject to location).

But occasionally, you get a chair that is truly unique. It is both beautiful and functional, nearly artlike. Maybe the designer had to tweak it to get it comfortable. Maybe there are a lot of details, or you've figured out a detail or style that is unique to your production. The patent provides the designer (or company) with the exclusive rights to produce that art-like detailed chair. The competing company theoretically can't produce an exact replica.

Sure, there will be some cheaper places that have the same sort of feel, but like clothing knock-offs, something is generally missing (like quality) and details have been changed.

> it also means that a well thought-out design won't be immediately copied.

And why is this good for society? Like the last paragraph in the article says, I think I'd much rather pay a smaller fee for functionally the same thing?

Because otherwise people will stop spending time making those special chairs.

Either you're trolling or have absolutely no concept of the amount of work it takes to create a really nice piece of furniture.

So there is no innovation whatsoever in the clothing industry? No real nice piece of clothing?

> what is society getting in exchange?

Not closing all existing creative businesses in developed countries, which would otherwise be completely unprotected against the knock-off industry from countries where manufacturing is extra-cheap.

Can't be that great at creating if they're still depending on decades old designs.

Nobody said otherwise, but they do provide employment and profit for the highly-skilled.

This development fits the "market of ideas" vision that developed countries have pushed ever since they lost manufacturing superiority to Asian countries. It's an overall attempt at maintaining some sort of upper hand in the commercial sector. Expect copyright and patent laws to be tweaked to cover more and more sectors - already they have been successfully leveraged in the food industry, for example, with "protected origin" programs.

The unfortunate side-effect is that we're edging closer and closer towards thoughtcrime: if the objects of crime are ideas, the agents to police must be minds.

Well, now they will have to be more creative, and the law works both ways, their designs will also be protected. So everyone will have slightly or more different designs, just for the sake of being different.