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Comment by photochemsyn | Hacker News Reader

Any IP protections lasting longer than 20 years are theft from human civilization.

1 year.

Zero seconds. IP protections are theft of future creativity, and a form of regulatory capture. If your idea is so groundbreaking that it can be reimplemented by someone else within a day, then maybe it wasn't actually so groundbreaking in the first place. And in practice the only rightsholders who benefit from enforcement of these "protections" are those who can afford to litigate them. Thus, it's a form of regulatory capture where the rich get richer, but in an unusually pernicious way - why keep innovating if you can litigate new entrants out of the arena before they can even compete with you? IP protections discourage innovation by creating incentives for first movers to kick the ladder out from under them. For example, see any company known more for its legal department than its products, like Oracle.

> If your idea is so groundbreaking that it can be reimplemented by someone else within a day, then maybe it wasn't actually so groundbreaking

I think that's conflating complexity with "groundbreakingness." If the litmus is "reimplemented within a day," well, I can't think of many invention that _can't_ be.

Take doorknobs for example (with the obvious counterpoint being that it's perhaps better to live in a world where doorknobs aren't patented as soon as they're invented).

If there is no IP protection, it is illogical to invest money in new materials R&D or medicines.

Illogical for the private sector. Publicly funded research is probably more effective anyway though.

The US tried that post WW2, turns out if you can print money there isn't a lot of incentive to work nights and weekends getting something out the door for government pay.

Damn. Imagine how relieved the inhabitants of Nagasaki and Hiroshima must feel about that.

Wartime is certainly motivation.

Not true at all. The people who worked on the moon landing famously worked a gargantuan amount of overtime.

I have friends who do research - their primary motivation isnt pay. The private sector exploits their passion by paying mediocre wages while the CEOs of these companies rake in millions. This is demotivating to say the least.

An efficient system compared to the public sector it is not.

Unless it takes real skill, real knowledge to create the workforce and tooling necessary to produce such a thing. With no IP protection I'm pretty sure that good old-fashioned corporate secrecy would still be quite profitable.

If in the case of medicines, instead of having carte-blanche to milk obscene profits for a long time, corpos were just limited to making decent money for a short while....that would probably work out in humanity's interest. Part of the reason medicine is so expensive in the West IMO, is the expense that's been mandated by the insane regulatory capture in the pharma industry.

Too expensive to create a secret environment that only needs one leak to make the entire investment fail.

The 'why' does not matter, real property rights should not be given up for the sake of completely speculative societal gain. Besides, the incentive to create medicine will always existed as long as people get sick, independent of whether you can exercise monopoly, it's not like Ibn Sina's medical manuals came about thanks to any notion of copyright, the dude was literally just rich and bored enough to do it.

It is logical, just not by a profit seeking enterprise expecting the same sort of returns that current pharma do.

I imagine R&D and medicines would be funded by organisations founded by Government, Teaching hospitals, Drug producing companies coming together to share the costs. Would be great to avoid wasted effort as well.

The Large Hadron Collider was completed, and yet isn't producing much profit.

Ok I support anti corporation but then how do talented artists make money?

I don’t get this mentality and how it’s always taken to the extreme. Surely there’s some value to at least the artisan to be compensated for his creation?

Nothing is stopping you from selling free software or public domain stuff. No one is being told they can't make money.

A real artist doesn't care about making money ;)

But in all seriousness, speaking as someone who uses adblock and watches youtube, I support creators by subscribing to their Patreon or Substack. And I support musical artists by going to their concerts. But the point is that it's opt-in. Beyond this, I don't feel any sort of obligation to submit myself to psychological manipulation of an advertising system I didn't consent to joining.

Most talented artists don’t make money even now — only the lucky few gets all the money.

Some form of UBI will be inevitable for human society to not collapse — there is not enough useful work for everyone.

Same way talented artists make money now. They're either already independently wealthy or have a side hustle.

> Surely there’s some value to at least the artisan to be compensated for his creation?

Try telling publishers that. Why are those writers striking again?

It's taken to the extreme because that's what you need to shift entrenched interests that produce nothing of value, like those that hold IP.

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