Hacker News Reader

Comment by doublepg23 | Hacker News Reader

It feels very human that we have a nearly post-scarcity delivery mechanism that we still optimize for rent seeking.

Yes. By design. Copyright law, and basically all other IP law, is explicitly and purposefully about allowing rent seeking. The idea is that in a completely unregulated market, it is impossible to make money from ideas after they are made public. Since making ideas public is good for society, we want to encourage people to continue to do this. Paying people is how we encourage people to do things. So we allow rent seeking, with limits, as a way to pay people even though they make their ideas public. The issue is with how far this rent seeking goes, and where the balance between social good and private good falls. I'm very firmly in the camp that most IP law has, in the modern day, gone too far. But I do think that conceptually it is beneficial to have and maintain some level of rent seeking.

Of course, we now have a torrential supply of available media, which markets strongly say is worth little to nothing. Apparently, given mass distribution tools and sufficient level of education, the public creates things on such a large scale that it can hardly be argued protectionist policies are necessary for them to exist.

We also see that even with these protectionist policies, only a select few are ever even able to be economically viable, let alone successful. Art's opportunity cost is so front-loaded that it's difficult to produce things while working full time, so the majority of potential successes are prevented from even starting. And then the artistic process is impeded by these laws, as rentiers cry "similarity" over the most absurd things, which creates a chilling effect. It's particularly bad in music.

The best way to support the arts is UBI and the abolition of copyright.

lol imagine if someone had copyright over 2-5-1 chord progressions lmao.

> The idea is that in a completely unregulated market, it is impossible to make money from ideas after they are made public. Since making ideas public is good for society, we want to encourage people to continue to do this.

This reasoning is taken at face value in most discussion but should be challenged. A lot of assumptions and potentially specious logic is embedded here, and it's not clear and obvious that any of the following are true:

* it is impossible to make money from ideas after they are made public

* Paying people to encourage making ideas public increases the amount of value

* most ideas are worth anything at all

* that the most valuable ideas will be made public even with these protection regimes in place

It's arguable that even though there was less information out there before copyrights and patents became a thing, that people were still driven to create art and science, and the quality per unit might have even been higher. And even with patent and copyright in place, truly valuable ideas are still kept secret.

The core value proposition of copyrights and patents is to make middlemen money.

> The core value proposition of copyrights and patents is to make middlemen money.

they also protect smaller and potentially more innovative operations from being out-executed by large capital pools.

i know that often times patents have been used by larger and more entrenched concerns to try and control entire spaces (like edison's mppc) but i often wonder how often the patent system has provided some breathing room and opportunity to build something of value for startups working in areas that large players come to identify as potentially profitable...

> Since making ideas public is good for society, we want to encourage people to continue to do this. Paying people is how we encourage people to do things. So we allow rent seeking, with limits, as a way to pay people even though they make their ideas public.

This is naive reasoning. People have been publishing content without any DRM and have been earning money regardless. There are even people who don't care whether they make money or not. So, monetary incentive is not a must for ideas, or any kind of work, to become public. To the contrary, such incentives drive out good ideas, or works, in favor of bad ones, which only care about the money and not the benefit of the society.

> So we allow rent seeking, with limits

Funny joke. Everybody laughs.

I think IP laws make lot of sense and so does allowing protection of such. It is only effective way to stop corporations from exploiting creators they do not have direct relationship with.

Not that the current term we have isn't extremely too long. And whole concept of lifetime being involved isn't just weird.

> The idea is that in a completely unregulated market, it is impossible to make money from ideas after they are made public.

Ain't that some bullshit.

We'd been around for two million years without anything like this. Rent seeking is a very modern invention in the lifetime of the human species, let alone establishing it over non-scarce ideas. It's very bourgeois, not very human.

I’m not sure it’s so modern. Every tollgate in the ancient world was effectively rent-seeking. Even in prehistoric societies, it seems there were protection rackets and shamans with “monopoly access” to the gods.

But for most of human history information was difficult and unprofitable to copy. Copying manuscripts by hand was expensive, and few people could read anyway so the market was limited. It’s no accident that copyrights were invented after the development of the printing press.

We've been around for two million years without anything like this. Electricity bad!

...was someone claiming that electricity is human nature, to make you think this was a valid analogy?

We didn't have X for two million years therefore X bad

I think it's a very strange argument.

My claim was that something we didn't have for any substantial amount of our two million years of existence isn't "human nature", not that it was "bad" (weird moralising on your part). Electricity isn't "just human nature" either. We should decide whether we as a society want or accept a given thing based on its effects on all of us, not whether it's "human nature" (which is almost always an incorrect claim when it's made).

Corporate greed knows no bounds. If they could erase your brain of "their" IP, they advocates would.

Creating the content is much harder than delivering it. The rent seeking is to encourage creation.

I love the precision with which you've said this - but I also I really need to feel like we need a better "general public" way to say it? I haven't figured this out yet.

I've always thought that reality has made their business model obsolete and untenable, so instead of adapting, they lobby and get laws written to protect it. Essentially "rejecting reality, and substituting their own".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com