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You created entire book ? Sell it for 40 years, sure But that should not apply to someone taking a tiny thing from it and making their own stuff around it, 10 years maybe.
Totally agree with that idea.
"Property" is a useful social tool for managing stuff that is scarce and which can't easily be shared. Food, tools, shelter, land, and so on. Property produces stability. People can count on having their stuff later, even if they're not using it at this instant. That lets them make longer-term plans, which, ideally, result in lots of different kinds of things becoming less scarce.
Ideas and information, however, are not scarce. Any number of brains and storage media can hold them simultaneously. That's not true of a pizza. But for a long time "intellectual property" worked pretty well because the copying of ideas and information required significant effort and materials. Books had to be typeset and printed. Music had to be stamped onto vinyl or written onto tape, which needed specialized equipment. All this made it so that we could pretend that ideas and information were scarce.
Now, that's not true anymore. Our technology has advanced to the point where the equipment for copying information is ubiquitous and unspecialized. We have to face the actual nature of information: It's not scarce. "Property" doesn't work on it anymore.
Which really does leave artists and authors and other intellectual producers in a bad spot, since the time and effort involved in creating stuff hasn't gone down. We have this kind of thing now where it either doesn't exist at all or it exists in such abundance that the adjective is unneeded. How do we economically incentivize something like that?
Personally, I lean towards the suspicion that for some kinds of things, mainly entertainment, we don't need to incentivize it anymore at all. People are not going to stop writing fiction and recording music just because it doesn't pay anymore.
The real jam is in non-fiction, because that costs of making that stuff are higher than just food and shelter for the producer while they're writing. Research often requires travel, experimentation, equipment, materials. How do these get paid for?
Yep
Theres no scarcity to manage here and its more comical the further I look at it.
>Which really does leave artists and authors and other intellectual producers in a bad spot, since the time and effort involved in creating stuff hasn't gone down
Well it may have done with LLMs we arent 100% sure there yet.
>Personally, I lean towards the suspicion that for some kinds of things, mainly entertainment, we don't need to incentivize it anymore at all. People are not going to stop writing fiction and recording music just because it doesn't pay anymore.
You cant copy an experience, people will always pack out stadiums for live music. If musicians wont make music because oops it got added to the gestalt cultural heritage of mankind well they can jump in a lake. And I have talked with tons of authors who have full time jobs on the side. This will only really impact the top 5% or so of professional authors, and force them to be more productive too.
>The real jam is in non-fiction, because that costs of making that stuff are higher than just food and shelter for the producer while they're writing. Research often requires travel, experimentation, equipment, materials. How do these get paid for?
Being the first person who can manufacture something still gives you a decent first mover advantage. It doesn't mean you cant sell your goods at a profit, it just means you have to sell your goods with competition. So less profit. Likewise with Music and Fiction, lots of people want to be first, your first book will sell a lot of copies, the first pressing of your vinyl also.
Honestly it probably means more public sector RND funding is required and not much else.
Capitalism by itself is incapable of valuing art and ideas beyond the marginal cost of producing duplicates, which has been on a steady downward trend since the invention of the printing press.
Our economy is increasingly reliant on a class of product that is fundamentally incompatible with how capitalism works. Maybe rather than adding to the centuries old hack that is clearly falling apart, we need to rethink things from the ground up.
Capitalism doesn't "assign value" to anything. It can't assign value to anything.
The value of something is determined only by a transaction. It's not assigned.
The value of something is made apparent only after an exchanged is made. Otherwise there is no "inherent" or "assigned" value to anything. The value is made explicit only after a transaction is made.
Abstract ideas don't really have value. Silicon Valley/Tech, which is perhaps the most ardent and exemplary capitalist industries today, does not assign value to abstract ideas. It assigns value to execution/tangible action.
This complaint about "determining" versus "assigning" value is not important. And copyright does follow execution, not the abstract idea.
Ownership of intellectual property still matters, but right to copy&modify shouldn't last that long. It isn't hard to imagine another system of IP rights that provide value to the creator but not to the expense of society. Disney used public domain to build it's foundation then pulled up the ladder. Disney's market cap is lower than the damage longer copyright has caused, it's already been trillions, hundreds of trillions looking into the near future.
Here’s one for copyright:
“Do you think any corporation should be allowed to make closed source forks of GPL software?”
You might argue that doesn't help much if they never distribute that code (only runs on their servers). Here’s the inconvenient truth: GPL already allows that. Anyone can take a GPL codebase, do any modifications they want, run it forever, and never contribute back. You’d need AGPL to forbid that. GPL is only concerned if you further distribute the modifications.
Next one?
GNU Bash is GPL. You can run Bash (and many other Linux commands) in Windows through Windows Subsystem for Linux. In fact, WSL is a nice example of Microsoft doing embrace & extend.
The challenge: find the Microsoft's published code for Bash.
apt-get source bash
Bash being GPL doesn't stop MS from benefiting from it by providing it to WSL users which make WSL more valuable for them. It also (as we talked in the other comment) doesn't prevent Amazon from running a database and charging people for it.
So what's this great advantage of GPL that it would make it worthwhile to keep the entire copyright system just so we could still have GPL?
If you dig around in its origin, GPL was concieved as a tool to "fight system from within system". If there's no system, you don't have to fight the system.
Then why did you ask for something if you knew it didn't exist???
Overall I think you are mistaken about the purpose of the GPL. It does not, nor has it ever intended to prohibit commercial activities. RMS and FSF have been pretty clear about this for many decades. And in fact, they are against the idea of licenses that prohibit commercial use.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html
The point of GPL is to enforce a specific worldview of developer freedoms through the application of copyleft.
The vast majority of Linux is not a volunteer project -- but software developed by commercial software engineers who are being paid by a company to write software. Before copyleft, the idea that they would voluntarily share source code was laughable. The only reason they do is because they are legally required to do so.
This viral nature of copyleft creates a positive feedback loop:
1. Company uses software because it is free and solves a problem
2. they need a modification so they make it
3. they contribute back to the project because it is required by the copyright license
4. the project becomes more valuable at solving more problems that other companies have
5. Go to step 1
Breaking this feedback loop would put companies back to their natural state of not sharing. The result is that the software landscape would start to look a lot like the 80s and 90s again.
Without copyright, copyleft would not exist. And without copyleft, Linux would have been a hobby OS that died out in the early 90s. We'd be using things like Windows Server, Unix, etc. And to protect their business in the absence of copyright, they'd have heavy DRM schemes, obfuscation, cryptographic licensing, etc.
It's much easier to upstream your desired changes than maintain a separate fork (closed or otherwise) long-term. Additionally, many of the contributors have been using it for own servers, not required to contribute back.
Things like NVidia and other closed drivers show you can bolt a non-open part to the GPL code if you try enough.
> And without copyleft, Linux would have been a hobby OS that died out in the early 90s. We'd be using things like Windows Server, Unix, etc.
This ignores the entire existence of FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD.
> they'd have heavy DRM schemes, obfuscation, cryptographic licensing
This ignores the existence of heavy DRM schemes, obfuscation, kernel-level anticheat spyware, criminalisation of copyright-circumvention schemes, etc.
At this point, I think you're just trolling, so I'll stop here.
Then why is ~75% of the kernel from corporate commits today? You think large tech companies just started to become coincidentally generous with the advent of Linux?
> This ignores the entire existence of FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD.
The BSD are quite niche in install base and highly rely on GPL'd ports from Linux.
And, by far the most popular OS in the BSD family tree is MacOS, which is primarily closed source.
> This ignores the existence of heavy DRM schemes, obfuscation, kernel-level anticheat spyware, criminalisation of copyright-circumvention schemes, etc.
I'm not ignoring it, I'm telling you that would be more common, if you remove the all of the other mechanisms by which a company could choose. Without any legal controls whatsoever, the only option to control the use of a company's software would be through technical means. Removing other options would be incentivizing this.
> Anyone can take a GPL codebase, do any modifications they want, run it forever, and never contribute back.
Only privately or over a network, but it prohibits distribution of binaries without source. This is the primary reason the GPL exists.
I'm not worried about Microsoft recompiling bash and redistributing it. Is that a realistic problem for you?
https://www.reddit.com/r/unpopularopinion/comments/bm1umw/in...
I think land ownership should be abolished. That'll never happen for a lot of reasons, but it's highly unethical in my opinion. Ignoring who the land was stolen from to begin with, I also feel that it's looting the future, land ownership often being generational and severely kneecapping society from making better, more productive use of a finite resource as its needs change over time.
I do not think intellectual property should be abolished outright, because I can't think of a reliable incentive structure constructed entirely from the social interest. I do think it, particularly copyright, should be severely curtailed, however. Companies exclusively controlling huge swaths of popular culture for 90 years or whatever basically amounts to theft from the public commons, in my opinion. If you're going to replace folk culture with Mickey Mouse, then we ought to own a bit of that, more quickly than is being done.
I have no issue with personal property and actually think it should be strengthened. Consider the right to repair; the right to run the software we choose on the devices we ostensibly own; the erosion of our ability to freely trade, share, and preserve increasingly digital products; stronger enforcement of Magnusson-Moss; infringements of our privacy in an online world; and so on.