The obvious counter-argument being that there's absolutely no moral or philosophical justification for the ownership of information. Intellectual property is nothing but a racket.
It's easy to diregard IP when you don't own any, but if IP didn't exist the big, bad, evil corporations could steal ideas from people with no recourse. In fact, that's exactly what happened with Robert Kearns[0]. He invented the intermittent windshield wiper and attempted to license it to motor companies. They told him no and later implemented intermittent wipers themselves.
Sure, you can disregard it as "why does Kearns need to own that idea?" But if it werent for Kearns, we probably wouldn't have intermittenent wipers nowadays. Also, if companies could just steal ideas from other people instead of investing in R&D, why wouldn't they?
Sure, IP can be abused, but like the majority of laws, was created with good intentions. Killing IP instead of closing loopholes that allow abuse is attacking the problem, not the cause. Without getting too political, that's the problem the left has with guns and the right has with encryption.
Probably not the best example, because you could make a strong case that, with intermittent wipers being such a simple invention, probably someone else than Robert Kearns would have thought about it between 1969 and today.
It's a balance, of course... However, under today's excessive intellectual property laws, even assuming that Kearns could have successfully protected his idea (because it's not like IP usually favors the small players...), would society really have benefited by limiting the use of this idea (or having everyone pay royalties to Kearns)? Wouldn't plenty of other people, in particular motor companies, come up with the idea "for free" in the 20 years of a patent term anyway?
Also, relevant to the original discussion is the fact that the general lack of IP protection for ideas is an important component of free scientific discourse. So science is another situation where the lack of IP laws is arguably a good thing. In this light, when you ask:
> if companies could just steal ideas from other people instead of investing in R&D, why wouldn't they?
I ask in turn: given that countries can use the research produced by other countries instead of funding their own researchers, why do they do it today?
Yeah, most great inventions would have been made within a year anyway. The truly great ones maybe in 5 years. That doesn't mean big rewards for the first inventor are wrong. The incentives from that is why so many push for these inventions.
The argument that if it wasn't for unions 100 years ago, we'd all still be working 14 hour days is based on a similar fallacy.
Now, if unions demand improvements during times of economic growth, and get them, they will of course claim they caused them.
You're probably not convinced, but that's enough for now :)
Don't be so sure - delays existed for decades prior, and windshield wipers existed since horse&buggy days - yet nobody realized the importance of combining the two. There is a reason to the saying "everything is obvious in hindsight".
What would be your reason for believing this?
In practice, they already can, because enforcement is ruinously expensive for individuals. The big, bad, evil corporations abuse IP to shut down individuals and smaller companies. Or just things they don't like competing with them. Witness Samsung and Apple.
> Sure, IP can be abused, but like the majority of laws, was created with good intentions.
A lot of things start with good intentions. However, we have to concern ourselves with results rather than intents.
Developing IP is expensive but protecting it is even more expensive. Imagine a company invents a cancer curing drug but it cost them 10 billion dollars in R&D. They get their patent but then their competitor spends another 10 billion dollars in R&D to make their own cancer cure that doesn't infringe the previous patent.
I think we should have a patent system where when a company creates a patent and it sets the price of the patent to the cost of the R&D (plus some profit) and all buyers will own the patent collectively. The cost is evenly divided across all buyers. Initially the first company that buys the patent pays 10 billion dollars covering the R&D costs. If a competitor buys the patent they will only have to pay 5 billion dollars which then are used to reimburse the first buyer so both only have to pay 5 billion dollars. The third pays 3.33 billion dollars which again are redistributed across the previous buyers. And so on.
You seem to be making a statement from first principles: ownership of ideas is absurd. Which, of course, it is. But on the same level of abstraction, who can own land or water or sky? No one.
But of course, to "own" these things is an abstraction for a contract created by the societies we're born into, about what you're permitted to do and what happens to people who break the contract. And in that sense, the argument needs to be about what costs and benefits to society, collectively and individually, come with that contract.
It then seems completely backwards to use intellectual property to limit "unauthorized" redistribution of articles, in the hope that this would help the "authorized" publisher to circulate the articles...
While some people try to conflate this with other kinds of IP, this is a completely different process, because research already funded by public money is being kept from the public.
Which means anyone who may be interested in research outside of academia - including startups, corporations, and private entrepreneurs - has to pay through the nose for official access.
And that simply removes money from the ecosystem and puts it in the pocket of the publishers. It doesn't fund new research, it doesn't increase publishing standards, it doesn't keep food on the table for struggling researchers.
It costs a fortune, but adds no social or scientific value at all.
People who own intellectual property are rarely the people who created it. Those people usually get nothing for their efforts beyond a wage.
Very little is new in the tabula rasa sense. Just look at Disney movies. I'm hard pressed to think of any of them that is not derived from something in either contemporary popular culture, or ancient stories.
the notion may have held up when it covered written stories in printed books, and only for a limited (20 years, iirc) period. This because the time window was relatively short, and because the number of book printers were low and thus easily policed.
In this day and age, i can produce a million digital copies of the bible in a second.
The free software movement weakens that argument quite a lot.
It was most likely one of their thousands of graphic designers making squat who found it on the internet, their design manager didn't catch it as a copy of something, and it wound up on their clothing.
A fury storm on Twitter with very strong suggestions to take against Zara was being proposed by many. I am sure there were some 'IP is a racket' people among them, but the argument seemed to be a one-way street: IP is free, except if you're a company who profits from it and we don't get our cut.
This was a great TED talk about it, and about why IP laws in general are bad and how they limit creativity:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLUzgWAEGjY
You may also be interested in the Everything Is A Remix video series, if you haven't seen it already:
Could you elaborate a bit, because on the face of it that seems to be kind of a ridiculous statement. There is extensive literature on the philosophical justifications for almost all parts of the law, including intellectual property. For IP, there are two or three major philosophical justifications. In Erupoe, an approach based on Hegel's theories of personality is common. In the US, Locke's theories of ownership of one's labor is often used as a justification.
Did you mean to say that you do not think that these philosophical justifications are sufficient, rather than that they do not exist?
Are you sure that the whole thing is really that simple? If information cannot be owned in any way, in any case, then don't the Udemy-using pirates from the othe HN story[1] have all the right in the world to do what they are doing? And surely it also means that for example all so called pirate version "China copies" of brands like Nike etc are also completely fine?
And it goes deeper than the megacorps. If no one "owns" any information, then no one can dictate how any single piece of it is used. So you don't get to say that NSA/Facebook/some random hacker has "no right" to hack into your emails and sell them to highest bidder. Or if you think you can, please lay out the logic chain leading to that, I wasn't able to come up with one quickly.
Finally, blanket statements lile this don't help anyone. I mean...your bank account and its contents are "info" nowadays, bits on some computers somewhere. Bits just like any other piece of digital information in today's world. I think we can safely say that is some information that is only fair to be owned by some, preferably the individual who earned that money.
Another way of looking at this is that music belongs to our culture, and access to it should be free.
On another note, I do believe information should be free. Where I start to vacillate is with who pays to extract, create or discover the information?
For instance, I know gold is a physical object, but a corollary of saying gold should be free, and yet who's work or money is put up to mine it from the earth? Some private researcher spends 15 years of their life, and discovers or creates something after investing their time, their money. Without a means to capitalize on it, what is the incentive to put in the hard work and money?
And before you say, it is never a sole researcher and their money, extrapolate up to a small shop, mid-sized company, and big company. The gist still holds.