I am strongly convinced that the possession of ideas and creations of the
intellect is not possible. In my opinion, only physical things can be possessed,
that is, things that are limited, that is, that can only be in one place. The
power or the freedom to do with the object what one wants correspon...
Hey mateys!
I made a post at /c/libertarianism about the abolition of IP. Maybe some of you will find it interesting.
Please answer in the other community so that all the knowledge is in one place and easier to discover.
I'm not opposed to intellectual property because there's an argument for providing a limited time monopoly to the creators of works to provide incentive to make works public. Without any such incentive, it's entirely possible that the monetization structures for different works change, for example locking content behind restrictive systems that don't allow for personal use at all.
The key is "limited time". If you can't make your money back in 15 years, then maybe it's time to make a new thing? The idea that someone should own a thing you made after you're dead is stupid -- how exactly will that promote you to create new works? If you're dead, your creating days are over except for creating plant food out of your bones and organs.
I put my money where my mouth is, and the legal page of the graysonian ethic specifically lists that the book is put into the public domain or license after Creative Commons CC0 license after 15 years from the date of first publishing.
If there was no intellectual property, what would prevent a company like Amazon to simply sell any work every published in their best monopoly marketplace without ever giving a cent to the creators? How would, for instance, the author if a novel make money?
Abolishing IP simply means the deepest pocket steals the market for everything. If you don't think Amazon can out produce and market your minuscule budget, you're insane.
I'm a fan of a copyright term similar to the original US copyright term. Fourteen years at the outset, with an additional seven (versus the 14) upon the payment of a fee scaled based on the revenue generated by a work (to be used to support artistic grants.) After all, if the argument is that copyright is necessary to protect artists' economic interests, it follows that copyright holders wishing to extend should pay back into that system if they want to extend.
I'd say society is better off with no IP related temporary monopoly than the system we have. There are enough instances where creators die penniless and publishers make all the profits to suggest there already is no financial incentive for an inventor to invent. Like Goodyear, they do it more as a hobby or in the interest of society.
Maybe if we had social safety nets so everyone not rich wasn't desperate, we might be able to have a robust innovation sector that was less focused on using law to screw competitors and consumers.
Intellectual property protects smaller innovators from larger companies. Imagine if you developed a novel process for solving a problem much cheaper than current methods. Now imagine if you started making some serious money doing this, and it starts to make some noise. What's to stop Amazon from just copying your process, and making it better/cheaper? They have the money to completely down you out.
Without Intellectual Property upkeep rights, any megacorp will just copy your idea and sell it for less at a broader scale, and cut you out of the market.
Yes, but also capitalism must be too abolished for it to work. At best we would just have the current big media corporations technically asset flipping smaller creators, at worst corporations just could use private armies to enforce their copyright.
A revocation of intellectual property will most likely require similar forces to the revocation of private capital — societally huge shifts in income distribution, production, infrastructure, and scale. I think those changes are worth making, but doing so would be very, very hard.
I am amenable to making current law much more reasonable, such as requiring a maintenance to keep IP relevant, cutting IP protection down to lifetime of author (not the company), making government funded IP freely or cheaply available to the public, putting abandonware into the commons after 10 years, fully legalizing emulators, etc.