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Comment by HeavenFox | Hacker News Reader

Every time I read about the incredibly exploitative scientific publishing industry, I can’t help but think: can we just make scientific papers not copyrightable?

Researchers and their institutions don’t benefit from the copyright protection; they barely make any money from their work.

Sure, someone can take your work and claim it as their own, but we already handle them as plagiarism rather than copyright infringement.

Currently all the works by the federal government are not subject to copyright, and many are scholarly work by NASA, Congressional Research Service, etc, and we never hear problem about it.

It is also not that far fetched. Copyright protects expression of ideas rather than ideas themselves, and I would argue for most papers, the expression is the less interesting part of it.

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I honestly feel like intellectual property is harmful in almost every field I look at. It concentrates wealth and slows innovation (the opposite of what IP proponents claim). I voluntarily waive copyright protection for most of my work, but I’d ideally see the dissolution of the concept more broadly. Our government protects these laws which I see as unjust, and some change to that would be beneficial I believe.

What I've seen in tech is that a patent is a straw asset to make the bean counters feel more comfortable. The value of non-capital-intensive tech companies is almost entirely ephemeral. Even for capital intensive ones most of the value is usually not in the physical capital but in the brand, ideas, collective employee knowledge, and customer relationships. A patent looks like a physical asset on the books so it makes accountants and investors sleep better even if it doesn't actually mean much of anything.

It'll probably fade away for the most part once a new generation that is comfortable with the dematerialization of value takes high leadership positions.

Google really tried to do this but stopped digitizing books halfway through the worlds collection because of copyright law. It hurts to think of all the knowledge we could have shared if this had been permitted.

Copyright as an idea is fine - as in, how it was described in the Constitution: "securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries", emphasis on "limited times". It's our current batarnak of an implementation that's causing all the problems.

Getting rid of copyright and instituting a copy-anarchy would mean that creatives would have no real incentive to publish (no matter how much you do for passion, you still need to keep the lights on and put food on the table) - but our current system, with lifetimes tied to the time since Walt Disney's death, is a bit of a mess too.

Can there ever be a happy medium?

> Can there ever be a happy medium?

Short terms (15yr?) for unregistered or "implicit" copyright, renewable with registration and fees that increase year-over-year.

How about a combination of

- free health care for all

- universal basic income at a really basic subsidence level

- voluntary patronage

People define themselves by their art if they can live a reasonable life and produce they will do it.

Yes! I see a more complex socialism as being necessary versus UBI, but in either case eliminating the need for survival work would mean artists could create art and be copied without anyone losing their livelihood.

I had this idea the other day that we should top this of with a type of “democratic” investment fund. Think pension funds, but structured to ensure a democratic representation of the public as owners, one share per citizen.

The idea being to allocate to each citizen an equal share, for equal voting power, and equal right to dividends.

The concept of 'free health care' in the absence of infinite resources has to be heavily qualified and that's the tricky bit.

Assuming people will create great works while living off a sustenance-level basic income is a bit of a stretch. And, it seems to ignore the extreme level of work, commitment, and persistence it takes to write books, publish science, etc.

The issue is not whether people should be able to profit off their own work but whether a rent-seeking gatekeeper should be able to hijack others' work and profit off it.

A system designed to artificially limit supply impoverishes the world and most of the profit inevitably sticks with the middle men whose existence is only necessitated by the artificial scarcity.

I specifically stated the sustenance level basic income plus patronage as I expect people must have enough to survive but ought to be incentivized to earn enough to live better.

I've heard others, not you, express the nonsensical idea that if people had enough to barely survive they would all quite providing value to society until the whole pyramid balanced precariously on the backs of the few remaining working people collapsed. This is a basic mis-analysis of human nature. People would strive to produce both for reasons of self worth and desire for a better than basic life.

I expect many to most writers with no readers and no earnings would eventually tire of the affair and move on to others.

Others would find a way to live a better than subsidence level life via patronage or doing other work to finance their hobby.

Do you really believe in a world without copyright that Stephen king wouldn't find any supporters?

I see it another way: bring about a true socialist society where people do not need to work to survive, and in that world people can do as they please with no concern for income. Creativity has many benefits other than income and eliminating profit incentives would allow us to pursue those other benefits more freely.

Paraphrasing a comment I read years ago: if your hypothetical economic system depends on everyone in the society behaving in a way that humans have never behaved in all of recorded history, it's pure fantasy. Eliminating the daily struggle for survival via something like UBI is not intrinsically a bad idea IMHO. Eliminating profit incentives altogether is effectively impossible - given the chance, most people will always act out of self-interest without even pausing to think about it. Or do you think socialist countries are magically free from corruption and greed?

a couple of things:

1) Much of what I advocate for is based on how many human societies have operated for millennia. Collective management on the tribal level seems pretty common historically.

2) Some innovation is possible. Our society every day does things we didn’t do for thousands of years. Technology definitely changes this, but for example we didn’t do very large representative democracies until recently. It stands that there still exist some unpopular ideas that would work better that what we have today.

There is a huge difference between "collective management on the tribal level" and abolishing the profit incentive in an advanced industrial economy. People who've never known anything other than prosperity have a tendency to idealize pre-modern societies - they vastly underestimate how miserable life was for most people, and how much violence was involved in organizing these societies. Imagine a typical homeless camp in the Bay Area, only more violent: sure, it's easy to forget about profit when you're engaged in a daily struggle to not die from starvation, disease, wild animals, bandits, or natural disasters, and close cooperation is the only thing saving your tribe from sudden extinction.

You and I have very different ideas about both what is possible in the future and what is acceptable today. It’s funny that you mention homeless camps, which would not be needed in a socialist society.

Getting rid of homeless camps does not require getting rid of the profit motive; most capitalist countries manage to not look like the Tenderloin. I'd even argue that the modern Western welfare state requires capitalism to generate the surplus wealth required to pay for it. Applying totalitarian social engineering to the problem is just overkill.

I don’t advocate for totalitarian anything - quite the opposite. I advocate for the development of a society where people voluntarily collaborate to eliminate things like homelessness.

> Copyright is what keeps billions of people from accessing every book ever written for free.

While that is true, would those books have been written without copyright protection? If you eliminate copyright laws today, will we see more or less (quality) books in the future?

Many patents areuseless.

But without patents, and with today's reverse engineering, most things would be reduced to cheap chinese clones.

Yet it's not the case, in many fields.

What I find interesting is how open source hardware companies can coexist with their cheap clones. The Prusa i3 printer is a great example. An assembled Prusa costs $1000 while clones are $200, and yet the two options serve different markets. If you’re a broke hobbyist you get the clones, and they take a lot of work to keep running. If you’re operating a school, business, or makerspace you get the Prusa because it’s the first party brand that works every time.

So I see all the businessss that would die without IP protection as maybe only existing because of our historical legal structure. Perhaps without IP laws the boundaries of who does what work would change but we would still strive to create new things just as we always have. Does that make sense?

One thing the layman loses with no IPR is the ability to tell which are the "real" Prusa, or the real brakes for their bike, or whatever. That is one thing that causes clear and imminent harm.

I'm pretty communist in my thinking, rail hard against established IPR structures, but most of it would be sensible IMO if the balance were shifted back toward the demos.

Things have been allowed to slip away from the IP deals such that the demos no longer get their part of the contract -- eg as established the deal with copyright requires deposit of copies in to pubic libraries (so they fall in to public ownership in a timely manner), DRM breaks the contract at the creator/business end and so such works should not get copyright protection, simple as that.

Yeah, I definitely agree with that.

Exactly the reason the term IPR shouldn’t be used https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.html

Apart from excesses, I don't even consider trademarks "real" intellectual property. If you infringe on a trademark you don't commit "theft", but fraud.

It's fraud towards the user but theft in the sense that it removes the ability for the trademarks 'owner' to use the mark to uniquely identify the origins of their goods/services.

If I also make Nike products then they lose the ability to identify by branding alone that marked goods are endorsed by them.

IMO trademark should have a requirement to identify the factory in which a good was made (eg on the label or packaging). That extends the ability for consumers to compare the _true_ origin of goods in way that gives usable information. Capitalism only optimises resources if consumers have perfect information ... so in theory a goal of capitalist government should be provision of as much useful information as possible.

An example of how that would be useful would be if I buy supermarket Weetabix, that uses the trademark shape, if they're from the same factory then they're probably the same product (not necessarily) so I can just buy the cheaper product.

No. A patent is like a nuclear missile. It’s useless until it is not. That said, you have to be very wealthy to fire those missiles, generally wealthier than your target.

That's the opposite of a nuclear missile. Those are useful now (deterrence) until they are not (when they are used).

A patent is like nuclear waste. It's useless, but it's going to stick around for long after the company that caused it is gone, and it can do a whole lot of damage if it ends in the wrong hands.

Yep. It’s a way to show something countable to shareholders when they ask: what do I own when I own this company?

> I honestly feel like intellectual property is harmful in almost every field I look at. It concentrates wealth and slows innovation (the opposite of what IP proponents claim).

Do you have any reference/proof for that? At least the part about slowing innovation?

There are few open access journals in my field, and the ones that will publish open access charge absurdly high fees for it. I have a spreadsheet for my field: $2000 to $3140 per article, average $2690. I tried to negotiate with one smaller and more specialized journal in my field on the fee without any luck. I've also tried to find journals willing to take my paper without copyright transfer, as if commonly done for US government employees, but few journals seem willing to do that without the law requiring it.

My solution at the moment: Publish only in conferences that don't require you to transfer copyright so I can distribute my paper open access without paying anything. Yes, the peer review, if there is any, is less rigorous, but my experience suggests that peer review typically offers only shallow critiques of my work. Peer review doesn't need to work that way, but that's how it is in practice at the moment. I think review is valuable, but this makes getting good reviews my responsibility, not a publishing venue's.

This solution also precludes me from working in most tenure-track academic positions, but I believe those positions are a bad deal anyway, so I'm not too worried. Government research positions seem usually okay with publishing mainly in conferences.

If there are any other issues with this scheme, I'm interested in hearing about them.

I'm against subsidizing open access publication as that seems to basically be a subsidy for publishers and not researchers. That would maintain the absurdly high open access feeds. Instead, let's make the journals compete on price, and they'll have to compete against free (e.g., Arxiv), so hopefully this would drive the prices down to a reasonable level. I'm fine with paying publishers if they actually provide a service commensurate with what they charge. The issue is that they don't right now.

Interesting that you did not succeed negotiating. We had a case where our open-access fund would only help out if the fee was $2000 maximum. We communicated that to the journal and they obliged without further comment. (Though this was after review and that journal really wanted our paper as it was obvious that we would raise their impact factor). I agree that $2000 still seems like a lot of money for an online-only document that journal is not doing anything for aside a little adjusting of the final pdf + paying the editor.

Thanks for your comment. Perhaps the order matters. I asked before submitting. I'll try submitting to the same journal and see if their willingness to negotiate changes after the paper passes review.

> Interesting that you did not succeed negotiating.

Cartels are pretty good at negotiating. Fuck off or bend over.

Not sure why you'd want to start making scientific papers non-copyrightable.

The easiest solution is just have scientists publish in open-access journals. Easy right? Nope, they are judged by the impact of their papers and it's higher in better quality journals.

That's the value these journals offer - exclusivity.

Scientists and universities could solve this issue immediately. Scientists publish in open-access journals and universities stop judging based on the journals "impact factor". However, neither one wants to do that.

Because there is no reason they should be, so the decision can be handled at the legal level and not be as subject to the influence of the journals. They would have one chance to fight it before it was cemented into law.

Why should an author not have rights to their own work, just because it’s scientific in nature?

You’re also opening the door to unintended consequences - are scientific textbooks not copyrightable also? If not, why not?

You're making a big assumption that the author of a scientific paper gets to have any rights whatsoever. But that aside - these journals keep valuable research locked up from plenty of long-dead researchers. Their estates aren't getting the money when a grad student is grifted for $90 to view the paper.

I'd argue we'd be much better off if textbooks weren't eligible for copyright.

In addition to what you said, I want to remind everyone that a significant portion of money that is used to fund research at universities (and other institutions) is from the government.

At least with most DOE-funded research, we're required to retain the copyright to the official "release" copy of papers. This allows us to redistribute the official paper ourselves.

Even if you don't retain the copyright to the camera-ready version of your paper, you can just redistribute a preprint version that is almost identical (on arXiv and/or your website).

"they barely make any money from their work." Researchers make zero direct money from publications. Yes, they are paid a stipend or salary to publish results, but by their University or Institute, not by Elsevier. I've published dozens of papers over my career. I have no direct access to any of them, save Sci-Hub or "authors' copies" I've saved. Of course, I could always pay the fee, ranging from $40-$110 on up , for a copy I would still be unable to legally distribute. Elsevier, Springer, et al., are the true pirates here. Its way past time this business model died the death it deserves.

While not 100% what you mentioned, in the Netherlands authors are allowed to freely share (semi-)government-funded however they please, after (I believe) six months. The universities now take care of that for you, if you're an author: https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care

I doubt you could come up with a workable definition of "scientific paper" to decide what is or isn't copyrightable.

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