Jack Dorsey and Elon Musk would like to ‘delete all IP law’ | TechCrunch

Maybe. That's certainly their intent. I could also see it working the other way though. No more patent trolls or companies hoarding good ideas.

Okay so at what point does it get handed off to private industry unless the government is just in business with manufacturers in a much more direct way than it is now? We'd need a completely different economic system for all research to be publicly funded. Consider this- often the way it works now is that a government funded researcher discovers a new molecule that could be useful. Then, private companies figure out how to make it industrially and run trials in pilot plants and design the plant to make it at scale. Should the government be doing all of that? This is extremely expensive, and I don't know how you'd try to prioritize resources in the current economic system.

Patents would be fine if the bar for "innovation" would be much higher, software patents weren't a thing, there was way more research done into prior art, and there would be different (shorter) lengths for patents depending on what industry they target.

Like, if it's manufacturing or something like drugs where it takes years before you can start making profit, sure, make them 10-20 years. If it' something you make money off of immediately, it should be shorter.

Manufacturing lines are built all that time for unpatented products,

And cheaply, because the research and productisation has been done by somebody else - this is an argument for patents

plus a competitor can't just "take all of that work and investment", they will need to put in money to create their own product,

Not true. One major issue is that many competitors literally copy the product exactly. Fake products wreck the original company

even if it's a copy they still need to make it work,

That is 100x easier when you have a working product to clone

They'll be second to market, and presumably need to undercut price to get market share... This is a very risky endeavour, unless the profit margins are huge, and in which case, good thing that there's no patents...

The point is exactly that the fake product undercuts the original by a huge amount (they had no investment to pay off).

If the research is so costly and complex (pharmaceutical, aeronautical,...), then it should be at least partly funded by the government, through partnerships between universities and companies.

I agree that the government model makes sense for a lot of areas and products. But note that a government won't invest millions or billions in developing a product if another country immediately fakes the product and prevents the government from collecting back the taxes it spent on the research.

As I discuss above there are lots of criticisms to the current IP laws - adjustment is 1000x better than abolishing a system that has driven research and development for several hundred years

In the US the tax payer subsidizes almost all drug research. Between 2010 and 2019 the NIH spent $184 Billion on all but 2 drugs approved by the FDA.

It worked out to about $1.5 Billion for each R&D product with a novel target and about $600 mill for each R&D product with multiple targets.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10148199/

Or

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama-health-forum/fullarticle/2804378

The cost to develop each drug is between about $1 and $2.5 Billion

I'm not sure how much is subsidized outside of NIH but I'd imagine other countries are doing the same.

Why should companies own the whole IP or perhaps why should they have any ownership if most of the funding is from the public?

I see the point you're aiming at, but it's not little companies discovering new drugs it's giant corporations (often on the back of government research money) who then 'swoop in' to protect their own profits while people in underdeveloped nations die of tuberculosis or whatever because they would rather make money than save lives.

idk i think our incentive should be to cure diseases with public funding and make people healthy instead of for profit but what do i know

The development of new medications should be 100% funded by governments and the IP that comes out of it should be 100% if the government, aka the people.

Governments are the ones that do the investments of projects that don't directly make money but are good for humanity.

You don't like that and the hepac drug can suddenly cost 70 dollars

The problem I mostly have is even when those costs are recouped most companies fight tooth and nail to keep the prices high and unaffordable in order to line the pockets of investors.

It's an interesting point that without any IP law, GPL would be invalid and corporations could use and modify things like Lemmy without complying with the license.

The GPL is basically trying to make a world without copyright. The GPL basically only has teeth in a world where copyright exists. If copyright didn't exist then everything would be in the public domain and the GPL would be toothless, but that's fine because it would no longer be unnecessary.

The rich want to do it because of AI. That's it.

They can already take whatever you create wihout giving you a dime. What are you gonna do, sue a multi-billion dollar company with a fleet of attorneys on standby? With what money?

They would certainly just settle and give you a pittance just about large enough to cover your attorney fees.

Do you know why companies usually don't do this? Because they have sufficiently many people hired who do nothing but create stories for the company full time. They do not need your ideas.

Copyright didn't exist for millenia. It didn't stop authors from writing books.

You're right. As we all know people only started to create art after IP laws where established.

Nobody ever made something original just for the joy of it. It's only fair that a single company has the exclusive rights on a pants-wearing mouse that looks a certain way for 95 years.

It'll affect it, but it won't stop it. This is a good question to bring up though.

I design medical devices. IP is incredibly important in this process to protect our R&D investment in the current system. If IP didn't exist, we'd protect that through other means like obfuscation of function.

Also if IP didn't exist, I could design devices that are so much better at healing people. So much of what I do is restricted because someone else has 30 years left on what they patented.

R&D is expensive. Just because you see what someone else did, doesn't mean you can easily replicate it.

In short: if your goal is pure profit, yeah removing IP probably hurts this a little. If your goal is producing the best product, then get rid of it.

I think the best solution would be a much shorter exclusionary period for patents.

People famously invented nothing before copyright law.

Did you not notice that almost the entire realm of technology runs on open source software largely written by volunteers? Yes your laptop may run a proprietary piece of software but not the servers it talks to, your phone, your apps, the cash register at the store, the computer chip in your kids toys etc.....

That's only true of the too few people that control too much resources

Not necessarily? You'd retain first-to-market advantages, particularly where implementation is capital-heavy - and if that's not enough you could consider an alternative approach to rewarding innovation such as having a payout or other advantage for individuals or entities which undertake significant research and development to emerge with an innovative product.

I think the idea that nobody would commit to developing anything in the absence of intellectual property law is also maybe a bit too cynical? People regularly do invest resources into developing things for the public domain.

At the very least, innovations developed with a significant amount of public funding - such as those which emerge from research universities with public funding or collaborative public-private endeavours at e.g. pharmaceutical companies - should be placed into the public domain for everybody to benefit from, and the copyright period should be substantially reduced to something more like five years.

Right, because no one ever does anything for reasons other than money. You definitely get paid to clean up the neighborhood park or help your buddy move right?

Busting of telecom monopolies doesn't lead to nobody building telecom infrastructure. And without state monopoly on alcohol production alcohol drinks don't become a deficit. They just become cheaper and less incentivizing - that's considered, but you have to solve deadlocks.

Nobody does anything anymore and we'll all just die. Gotcha.

Make yourself the question: how does genai respect these 3 boundaries set by IP law? All providers of Generative AI services should be forced by law to explicitly estate this.

The problem with attribution is the difficulty of 1000% accurate compliance.

If you grab 100 lines of code from a repository, or five paragraphs from a story, there's probably a claim there. If you grab a single word, there's probably not. But in the middle, there's a paralysis of uncertainty-- is n lines similar enough to create liability? Can you remember where you saw what reliably? You end up with a bias towards "over-attribution" and it becomes difficult to pare it back. Does everything need a full Git-style commit history? Are we forever stuck keeping a credit on a project because it's difficult to prove you've fully scrubbed their contributions?

Focus on how we pay artists (ideally lush grants) and forget about credit. Maybe establish a culture where it's voluntary and acceptable-- that people feel that they're allowed to cite their raw materials, and reuse doesn't make the work lesser-- but don't try to use the courts to force people to try to remember and track where they saw something when they just want to create, or it creates a hostile environment.

The imbalance against giant corporations isn’t anything to sneeze at, but there are just as many (probably more) small time companies breaking copyright law and hoping nobody notices. For example, stealing artwork to print on cheap crap that you sell below what the creator is selling them for. If they’re in an area that recognizes that copyright then they’re going to lose every time, and they’re not going to have enough money to drag it out. After that happens artists can recover all the earnings that were made with their work. Without that the artist is just fucked.

It’s still a misguided policy aimed at furthering the lie of individualism. Which why we have so many ridiculous true stories of parallel invention, and scientists racing to the patent office to claim full credit.

These people are building on the works of all those who came before. All should benefit from the results. And all should enjoy a basic standard of living, instead of this cut throat first past this finish line system, where all who fall behind will suffer.