Hacker News Reader

Comment by Veen | Hacker News Reader

It’s an interesting attitude. Of course, if everyone thought that way most of the the things we buy digitally would never be made in the first place.

View on HN

It would be a very different world, for sure. Public funding and patronage would play a significantly larger role than they do now, works produced non-commercially would have bigger prominence. It's harder to say what would happen in absence of patent laws. Higher reliance on trade secrets? Non-competes in every employment contracts?

Overall I don't think that we would be significantly worse off, especially now, when it's technically possible for general public to engage in croudfunding.

I believe even technocratic communism would fail for the same reasons that agrarian and industrial communism failed. Lack of incentive to work hard, Goodhardt's law, destruction of those who try to retain property rights, etc. Even today's open source movement is very parasitic on the commercial sector. Without big tech companies OS would disappear.

I don't thinks that lack of legal protections for IP is in any way an equivalent to communism. Money would still be on the table, it's just the way they are gained would be somewhat different. IP as a concept isn't even that old and our societies managed to exist, produce works of arts and various services just fine.

As for the big tech firms - why wouldn't they exist? Would Google be disrupted if tomorrow all patents in the world became unenforceable? Or Amazon? Sure, MS might be in trouble, but what they are doing already feels like a gradual switch to a service/subscription based model.

Well, as someone who may create IP, I would like recourse to the legal system in order to enforce ownership of what I create. I imagine there are many people like me.

Most of the people who ever told a story, sang a song, or drew a picture had no notion of intellectual property or expectation of its legal protection. Yet they told, sang, and drew anyway.

Did they make multi-million dollar movies?

Some might consider this a benefit.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com