- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.zip
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.zip
Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter (now X) and Square (now Block), sparked a weekend’s worth of debate around intellectual property, patents, and copyright, with a characteristically terse post declaring, “delete all IP law.”
X’s current owner Elon Musk quickly replied, “I agree.”
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This isn’t as forward thinking as you’d want it to be.
For as much as they are abused, “IP laws” protect small and individual inventors, writers, composers, etc.
With no patent, copyright or trademark protections the billionaires will own or bury everything.
What is needed is to bring the laws back to their intended purpose.
That last sentence is it. IP laws are outrageous monstrosities these days, with folks like Disney getting 100-year long exclusive IP rights to characters and stuff like the DMCA.
Fundamentally it should be an attribution and reward system, whereas currently it’s a false scarcity system.
Everyone should be able to use everything, but you should be required to attribute your source material. If you do, the song / work etc should get an extra licensing fee per play. That way you’re always encouraged to provide attribution since you don’t lose money from it, and wholly original works will be cheaper and thus more desirable.
Not dissimilar to how song sampling works today but without all the manual negotiation for every license.
And if you fail to provide attribution you get hit with appropriate penalties.
But how much do IP laws actually protect the little guy? When a large corporation can bankrupt me by prolonging litigation until I have nothing left, what leverage do I really have?
There are certainly cases where small creators and inventors were able to overcome this disadvantage, but I suspect that they are the tiny minority, celebrated when they do achieve it.
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.
I’m pretty much on board with getting rid of software patents as they are absolutely ridiculous, but I don’t think we should necessarily get rid of the rest, but they do require reform.
And people flocked to this guy’s social network
It is not and never was his social network. And the fact that they upset him so badly that he left is probably a good sign.
I think ip laws are important but need to be changed. One example are things that are funded by tax dollars. They can’t own the ip of something we funded even if partially funded. Maybe let them hold the ip until they recoup their cost.
I also think that it is OK for companies to have ip, but it needs to be shorter. Like, they get 10 years or they earn 10x their cost on developing it.
Im not saying my exact ideas are perfect, but just an example of how ip should not last for as long as it does.
Musk is out to delete all laws that don’t benefit him, and replace them with harsh private rules that are not accountable to the people.
I see someone read “Chokepoint Capitalism” 3 years later.
So delete all pharmaceutical IP to make drugs accessible to everyone and save taxpayers trillions?
This is why it’s a mixed bag for me. IP law is kinda important in a capitalist system, which, for better or worse, that’s what we have. If someone comes up with a wonder drug that outright cures addiction or something, you’d want that person to be able to recoup their costs before a bigger organization with more capital swoops in and undercuts them on production costs until they’re the sole supplier of the drug. The hepatitis C cure drug selling for $70,000 is a great example of this quandary; there’s millions of dollars worth of research and clinical trials that went into developing the drug, you’d want the company to be able to recuperate the costs of developing it or else there’s less incentive to do something similar for other diseases down the line. Also, though, $70,000 or go fucking die is an outrageous statement.
Of course, what we have for IP law in practice is a bastardized monster, where corporations exploit the fuck out of it to have monopoly control over important products like insulins and life-saving medications that cost cents to produce and allow them to sell for hundreds a dose. That’s not the intent of IP law, IMO, and that doesn’t really serve anyone.
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.
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
You’re right.
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
I agree, though I will note that I have often found that there is a non-trivial gap between what is and what ought to be.
Companies will not — ever — dump hundreds of millions/billions into developing a drug only to have it be sold at cost or even worse, completely losing out on it when a competitor sells a copy of it at a price you can’t match.
And even if they did suddenly turn to altruism like that, they’d very quickly go bankrupt.
Why would anybody spend billions making new drugs if they knew with 100% certainty that they’d never make the money back?
We may not like it, but that’s the system that we have. Some form of IP law should exist to encourage these companies to continue putting out medicines that better our lives, it’s just that our current ones go way too far.
We already fund the research of new drugs almost entirely through publicly funded projects which then HAND OVER the patent rights to whichever company has the most former board members in the executive branch at the time.
I watched it happen in real time during covid while working for the DPH. Those companies produce NOTHING. They are the literal obstacle to creating new medicines and making them widely available.
I’m against the context of the main post but putting on a cape for medical patents is wild. The entirety of healthcare in america is inexcusable. Let’s stay focused on the AI tech oligarchs robbing us of our futures and attempting to frame it as a concern with intellectual property.
“Noooo, not like that!”
Talking about “IP” as if it were a single thing confuses any debate. Copyright is not a patent, which is not a trademark - they do different things.
Software patents actually should be deleted. It is impractical to avoid accidentally infringing as there are multiple ways to describe the same system using totally different technical descriptions. Copyright for software was enough.
It’s not a surprise that all these techbros who want to steal everything and feed it into their AI machines without paying a single fucking cent to the original creators all the sudden want to get rid of IP. They can lead by example by submitting their IP into the public domain.
Or maybe they’re just massive frauds?
This is of course after they spent decades consolidating power, wealth and influence with those same IP laws, while snuffing out all smaller competitors.
The speed with which Americas tech CEOs have embraced this new oligarchic system is astounding. It’s almost like that was the plan all along. Almost.
IP law does 3 things that are incredibly important… but have been basically irrelevant between roughly 1995-2023.
- Accurate attribution. Knowing who actually made a thing is super important for the continued development of ideas, as well as just granting some dignity to the inventor/author/creator.
- Faithful reproduction. Historically, bootleg copies of things would often be abridged to save costs or modified to suit the politics of the bootlegger, but would still be sold under the original title. It’s important to know what the canonical original content is, if you’re going to judge it fairly and respond to it.
- Preventing bootleggers from outcompeting original creators through scale.
Digital technology made these irrelevant for a while, because search engines could easily answer #1, digital copies are usually exact copies so #2 was not an issue, and digital distribution made #3 (scale) much more balanced.
But then came AI. And suddenly all 3 of these concerns are valid again. And we’ve got a population who just spent the past 30 years living in a world where IP law had zero upsides and massive downsides.
There’s no question that IP law is due for an overhaul. The question is: will we remember that it ever did anything useful, or will we exchange one regime of fatcats fucking over culture for another one?
How does genai make those concerns valid again?
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.
I’m still not getting it. What does generative AI have to do with attribution? Like, at all.
I can train a model on a billion pictures from open, free sources that were specifically donated for that purpose and it’ll be able to generate realistic pictures of those things with infinite variation. Every time it generates an image it’s just using logic and RNG to come up with options.
Do we attribute the images to the RNG god or something? It doesn’t make sense that attribution come into play here.
The current US trade war is the perfect opportunity for some other country or countries to “right-size” their IP laws.
Hollywood wanted “lifetime plus 900 years” or whatever. So, whenever the US negotiated a trade deal it said “you only get tariff-free access to our markets if you give Hollywood lifetime plus 900 years in your country too.”
With section 1201 of the DMCA this also meant that other countries had to accept that you could only repair your John Deere tractor if you paid Deere for the privilege. Or that HP could prevent you from using any ink but theirs in your printer, allowing them to make printer ink the most expensive liquid on the planet.
If the US is no longer abiding by the terms of their trade agreements, other countries should no longer honor these absurd IP treaties.
Disney vs the tech brats. Jumbish, bring me the popcorn
Dorsey got fired from his own company by the board for incompetence.
Was that from Bluesky or somewhere else?
twitter. He was fired as ceo in 2008, was brought back, and then again was told to step down by the board or be fired. https://www.axios.com/2021/11/29/jack-dorsey-step-down-twitter-ceo
Do it., but also ensure that all work enters the public domain and is free for anyone to use, modify, commercialize, or basically whatever the GPL says.
Nonono, see, they will have punitive contracts with employees that will nail them to the wall if they leak source code.
They like rules as long as they’re the one writing them.
That’s what would happen if copyright doesn’t exist. If a company releases something, it’s immediately public domain, because no law protects it.
GPL
The GPL is very much not the public domain.
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.
No, the GPL very much requires copyright to work. The whole point is copyleft, which obligates changes to the code remain under the same license and be available to everyone.
Without copyright, companies just wouldn’t share their changes at all. The whole TIVO-ization clause in the GPL v3 would be irrelevant since TIVO can very much take without giving back. Copyright is very much essential to the whole concept of the GPL working.
Just think, why would anyone want to use Linux if Microsoft or Apple could just bake Linux into their offering?
No, the GPL very much requires copyright to work
That’s what I said.
The libertarians want everything for free. Interesting.
What libertarians? I don’t know much about Dorsey, but Musk doesn’t seem much like a libertarian to me.
And the second they get it, they reinvent IP law, but in an even more restricted form.
Well now they will just crush opponents via favours from the politicians they directly and openly paid for.
