Comment by tbrownaw | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tbrownaw | Hacker News Reader

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For example, no startup could hope to survive without laws protecting trade secrets.

The assumptions here are that your secrets give you an advantage by being secret, that they're easier to steal than to rediscover, and that that advantage is necessary to success. These assumptions are not universally correct, and I suspect that their degree of correctness is rather strongly overestimated.

Founder groups would have the same problem in pre-formation situations. Say, four founders build something that they have worked on for a full year and are prepared to launch. One of them defects and says to the group, "I am going to take everything that we have worked on and take it for myself." Of course, that is outrageous. Buy why? Because laws exist that declare it illegal for someone to misappropriate what the founders have been working on. Those are IP laws. They protect the interests in intangible property. Without them, every founder would be vulnerable to such defections, without any form of legal recourse.

That doesn't sound like any of the standard copyright/patent/trademark/trade-secret categories, it sounds like it has something to do with (probably implied) contracts.

Open source is no exception. It relies heavily on rules of copyright law and on licensing to make its system work. If everything were freely shareable without any form of restriction, one does not have open source - one has freeware.

So then Postgres, SQLite, the BSDs, clang, etc are freeware instead of open source?

Startups depend heavily on IP laws. Such laws have great value in today's startup culture and ought to be recognized for that contribution. Reform them, absolutely; abolish them, don't even think about it

I don't think that's a sound argument, we've done just fine abolishing other practices that businesses seemed to depend on. What is observed to happen when/where such laws don't exist or are generally ignored?

When the startup lawyer says that the protections for parties in startups from defection and unfair competition are derived from IP laws, I tend to believe him. You seem to retort, "but that's contract law!". But those are contracts protecting intellectual property.

Postgres, sqlite, BSD, and clang are BSD-licensed open source. But many more projects are GPL-licensed, and thus depend entirely on IP law, than those that aren't. Without IP law protections, those GPL projects compete on an unlevel playing field with companies that would otherwise be free to capitalize on all their work without contributing anything back.

Finally, of the list of YC companies here: http://yclist.com/, how many take no advantage of IP laws? How many are entirely BSD-licensed open source? How many have no trade secrets?

IP-based startups (and their lawyers) defending IP laws is similar to big agriculture (and their lobbyists) defending farm subsidies. Yes, they will be affected by the change, but if they don't even bother to try and make an argument as to why society would be worse off under a different system then why would you listen to them?

Though personally once you've used the phrase "Intellectual Property" the game is already over. The various things people lump under that heading are so broad and disparate that you might as well just say "laws need changing" and counter with "we need laws". That's not even getting into the fact that you're implicitly accepting that you're talking about a form of property, rather than government regulation and monopoly grants.

I assume you include every manufacturer of goods that has a patent as "IP-based startups"as well? Patents are IP. Just because you don't like Angry Birds or some other app maker getting rich doesn't mean IP is bad.

Could it use reform? Heck yeah. But your view is no better than the supposed lawyers you hate against.

>That doesn't sound like any of the standard copyright/patent/trademark/trade-secret categories, it sounds like it has something to do with (probably implied) contracts.

If they copy code it's copyright infringement (often even if they wrote it!, depends on the contracts). If they copy model details it can be copyright, design rights and sometimes trademark and even patents. If they copy technical working features that were patented then they would be in violation unless they were the sole rights holder. If they exploit secrets they learnt in the course of working in the company they would be breaching trade-secret laws.

And yes, most likely they'd be breaching contractual agreements in addition. But the GP's description sounds exactly like the sort of thing protected by IP law.

IANA(Patent)L but have worked previously for several years in IP.

>>one does not have open source - one has freeware.

This is actually wrong, one then has PD. Freeware is still protected by copyright law and unless an additional license is given can't normally be commercially exploited, nor could I claim authorship, etc..

>What is observed to happen when/where such laws don't exist or are generally ignored?

It's hard to tell, there are barely a handful of countries that do not have IP law. For example the Paris Convention (patents) has 173 countries signed up, the Berne Convention (copyright) has 164 (Wikipedia figures; out of 190ish countries).

I'm with the GP I find IP law vital but in desperate need of reform.

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