another example of bad patent use: in India they mix several patented cancer medications and have way better results. but when India entered some economic contract with the EU they banned all those mixes.
Most innovation is a collaboration between the brightest minds. We live on the shoulders of giants. Giving the monopoly of ideas and technology to a Multinational corporation will never help to the most of humanity.
Good points. The 2008 economics book ‘Against Intellectual Monopoly’ & the 2001 essay ‘Against Intellectual Property’ are the two most important texts of the last century! Each has nearly flawless argumentation. All intellectuals & people interested in art, tech or economics need to read both (free online). If you can’t read them now, then write down both titles so you can tell others so they can read them.
In Seattle there was a coffee shop called Starlucks, it was older than Starbucks, Starluck was the guy's last name (provision for conflicting names if it's your name), and Starbucks sued him out of existence.
Exactly! Unfortunately this absurdity is what perhaps most of law has come to today. And it also fully permeates our culture with the oligopolist IP propaganda we continue to be incessantly bombarded with.
The 2008 economics book ‘Against Intellectual Monopoly’ & the 2001 essay ‘Against Intellectual Property’ are the two most important texts of the last century! Each has nearly flawless argumentation. All intellectuals & people interested in art, tech or economics need to read both (free online). If you can’t read them now, then write down both titles so you can tell others so they can read them.
@@acctsys No the reason is, if an adult is fighting a child, giving them both swords does not help the child, it just makes the fight fatal. A small company may threaten with 1 patent, then the large company will bury them with 100 related patents. It's the reason why there are 3 cell phone manufacturers: Samsung, Nokia, Apple, which is Asia, Europe, US, so basically 1 per legal region; so few car manufacturers, so few medicine manufacturers. The idea that patents help small companies is a myth. If patents help new companies, then the old companies would be campaigning against them, not for them. Patents are the invocation of monopoly. There is no right way to do the wrong thing. End patents.
I think artists should recieve their compensation BEFORE their work is released so that way people know whether or not fans were satisfied enough to stay loyal or not.
That's great. More and more artists should allow other people to freely use their works. A lot of culture is built off of the past, and a fresher public domain means that culture can build off of fresher past works.
This was a very enlightening debate. I have actually changed my position on this topic. I use to be in support of IP and CR, but now I can see that IP is just a tool of monopolists to limit competition and stifle innovation. The drive to incentivize seems to flourish when it is left to free-market forces; not when it is impeded upon by legislative restrictions (statutes and patent licenses). Basically, systems that eliminate competition suffer due to the limitations of the instituted patent. Non-contractual exclusivity results in poor efficiency because the chance to improve such inefficiencies becomes illegal. I would posit that a patent-free world would alter the way idea creators profit and it would increase the development-rate of such a society.
I would agree, if there is a level playing field like with copyright because everyone has the ability to be creative, same goes with Software patents. With physical patents a competitor can just copy your product without the expense R&D phase. There has to some way to counteract this, but it can't me as broad that you can patent anything. The same goes with social justice. If schools are funded through property taxes and parents can't choose schools then the playing field becomes unfair as low income areas get poorly funded schools and therfore can't as especially escape poverty. It's just that school choices is a much better solution than discriminating based on income or even race.
The man sounded like Keynes touting that inflation is a sign of economic success. Tsk tsk. It’s a symptom of engineered scarcity and planned obsolescence!
Professor has all these neat theories of how things are supposed to work under the guidance of the conditions he dictates as a premise. Unfortunately for him, as studies backed with empirical evidence demonstrate, none of them have basis in actual practice. It's mind boggling that in light of the weight of the information he's presented, he won't entertain the idea that his theories might be pseudoscience at best.
He says it cost a billion dollars to invent a product but is not looking deeper. If all the processes of getting to the outcome of the finished drug don't have the stifling legal limits in the first place, the free market might be able to produce that same drug for 10K dollars; some of the medical equipment have enormous costs because of the very laws he's suggesting help to save us money in the long term make them artificially expensive.
Collective learning is good evidence as to why patents and copyrights should be abolished The invention of a tv was not all at once It was a cumulation of many inventions
have fun watching and reading work after work full of product placements, agendas, shilling etc. It's already bad enough with protected works. Xnaying copyrights will ruin art
If it's impossible for the ordinary citizen to enforce, the it needs to be rethought. Too bad this is the opposite of the current system. Most systems start out with the best of intentions though. One reason why regulatory capture is a thing.
Yes, this is very true. If it requires a system to enforce and not an individual, then it is something where the costs and burdens rest on "other people" who often don't even know of the specifics and you can never really weigh the benefits vs the costs because value is subjective and cannot be compared in some mathematical way.
My grandfather (who is a son of Chinese immigrant) once said "why China lost its technological advantage to the West? Because in China we had no IP/patent. The old masters jealously guard their knowledge, their secret techniques. Sometimes an old master carry his best knowledge/technique to the grave, while in the West you need to publish your secret technique to obtain IP. You still profit from your secret, while forcing others to innovate". IMO IP is critical, it foster *innovation* from both sides: the one who own the IP could recoup his investment, thus allowing him to continue research, and those who want/need the IP but somehow can't get the license will innovate around it.
@@Korodarn The state is a system where "other people" (police officers and judges) defend the property of individuals they usually have no prior knowledge of. Value in the economic sense is to some extent subjective, but rights, including property, is not. Rights are objective.
@@Korodarn See now that’s just untrue. We can both agree on the state being an improper mediator but who’s to say but if I build a website and hosted on Amazon that Amazon couldn’t be the moderator to make sure nobody was copying what I’m doing? That would be a system and as an ordinary person I wouldn’t have the power to stop it but I also wouldn’t be empowered to create it in the first place
Note that the little guy gets no real benefit from patents because you are forced to find the person who is infringing it (and you can only guess at it as you'll likely have no clear proof), then hire lawyers to prosecute the patent against them, costing millions and having no clear outcome.
Through and through, IP in practice seems only good for propping up ponzi schemes. With the rise of digital technology I’d think it’s just entirely outdated, and not that it was defensible to begin with seeing to what it has inevitably lead into in the current day. Technocrats love it.
The little guy should seek investors to put his patent into use. What's the point of applying for patent if you are not gonna use it, you could just make it public domain.
@@Hibernial Well, you can choose to use tech with free/open license. However, most business and corporations choose proprietary solution because they need *support* from the developer/inventor. If you want to use certain proprietary tech, or artwork, or music for your project/business, but for whatever reason you don't want to pay for it, you are forced to *innovate,* to create something else to substitute it. So, even in this situation, IP actually foster innovation: You need to innovate around it, and invent something that's just as good, or better than current IP.
This is absolutely not true. The little guy gets the benefit of a new product. I own a business that creates custom software for law firms to automate their systems. It takes me years of work to do this work. If any old Joe can come along and copy/paste my code and sell it for 1/20th of the price, then I won’t create the code at all because I wouldn’t be able to make any money on it.
@@LegalAutomation Hold up, that sounds like you are getting custom orders and each piece of code you write goes to the company that requested it and you yourself don't find much of a way to reuse it in the first place because its created for the specific law firm. I.e. even if any old Joe came and copied your code, they wouldn't be able to find a use for it because it's created for a certain system with its own idiosyncrasies. Do I misunderstand?
"Without IP protection, you wouldn't get books or knowledge... Except that which was created before IP protection." Maybe the point of life is to share?
@@bgiv2010 copy, as copying is the fundamental principle of not only computing, but life itself. Cells reproduce by copying, and so does code on a computer
@@nimbletimplekins7601 hey! Don't pigeonhole me: I'm not just into computers! I know artists are master copy cats, too! Capitalism makes copying seem dirty but that's all I want to do. You're absolutely right. What about trust? Leaving oneself open to imitation could be risky.
Fascinating discussion. It's hard to get your mind around abolishing intellectual property rights but in large part that's probably because we just grew up with it as a "fact of life" sort of thing
Copying is not theft. Stealing a thing leaves one less left Copying it makes one thing more; That's what copying's for. Copying is not theft. If I copy yours you have it too One for me and one for you That's what copies can do If I steal your bicycle You have to take the bus, But if I just copy it There's one for each of us! Making more of a thing, That is what we call "copying" Sharing ideas with everyone That's why copying is FUN!
@@nimbletimplekins7601 Interesting take that argument with an east asian country that literally takes anything for profit without respect for property rights and copyright laws I worked so hard to make something then they copy it and exploit it my creation for easy profit Copyrights should always exist.
@twiet ter china went from an agrarian backwater sh!thole to the world's industrial center in the span of 50 years because they don't give a fvck about your intellectual """property""" laws. Now they make almost everything you use on a daily basis, sounds like it worked out pretty good for them. Monopolies aren't property rights and you do not have a right to control what other people do with their own property, seethe cope mald gweilo.
Copyright can be fixed. There's a new trend where creators now use their copyright to target social platforms instead of regular people. If social media permits engagements on their work then they have violated copyright, until then they have not. Let's see how these tech tycoons like it. 😂
1st dude... there's no evidence to support what we've been doing out of momentum and possible villainy. 2nd dude... I reject your demand for evidence. Have some speculation and assertion instead.
I'm from Argentina, studying in the National University of La Plata. We are working on an "open and free" patent system, not to replace nor Abolish the current copyrights and Patents. We need and we WANT the possibility to choose if we want to patent in the "classical way" or in "an open way", we want to create a community, like GNU/Linux, Creative Commons licence for patents, Wikipedia, Blender, and more.
Man I never heard of that. Is this supposed to be a law project that'll go to congress or what? I'd find that quite odd if that's the case because neither of the two greatest parties are very pro-competition and rather prefer monopolization and protectionism.
@@buriedunborn I have no idea how to do this. I know the main organization that promotes this is the WIPO. It's a project I'm doing for my University. Still on progress ... and I'm not an attorney, I'm studying engineering.
Wow, that's interesting. Some places in the world have minds that are 100 years ahead of the current time we're in now. Small glimpses of a possible future is neat to know about.
@@Hibernial Nah fam, like 60% of people in Argentina are stuck in the 1920s pretending that massive state intervention on the economy is a good way forward.
I personally believe that the world would be better off if it was structured more like open source. Instead of everyone fighting to get ahead of everyone else and make money off of everyone else, we'd work together from the realization that collaboration is what creates great things. Companies are just singular entities made up of groups. The system is structured in such a way that you need to fend for yourself to get by. You can't rest, because your competition doesn't rest. And actively competing doesn't mean they're competing for the consumers, they compete for themselves at the expense of everyone else. To corporations, people are the food. As companies grow larger and larger, they want more food. Never enough. All affect everything else, nobody can "chill" because then you lose market share and go bankrupt. The arrow must go up, always. But as it turns out, open source communities are also groups. But the structure is inherently different which makes them act differently as well. Capitalism as it is today favors profitability over basically everything else. In theory, people could "vote with their money" but this is the biggest lie of all time. Ask ANYONE to switch to an alternative product or service and they'll say no. They'll go to great lengths to avoid the slightest inconvenience. To make a switch it requires you to actually understand other eco systems, products, services and how you could do the things you want to do there. But most of all, it requires that all your friends (and other systemic networks or groups) also follow along. Nobody wants to be the first one and nobody wants to miss out. I've realized that I don't want nor need to be in these prisons. Sometimes missing out is a relief. I haven't escaped all the prisons, but there's a long list of things I'd never buy, use or install. It's a decision and more and more people are moving away from toxic technology. The more people adopting the open source philosophy in all corners of live, the better. I've found that there are open source enhancements and features I can't live without, but in a positive way. If someone tried convincing me to move from Linux to Windows, I'd laugh from happiness knowing that the switch was one of the best things I did. They'd just remind me of that. Remember, it is never about making the best product, it's about making everyone believe it's the best product. They do this by pouring money into marketing and market manipulation. It's not always a bad thing, but there are huge flaws in this model. The need for marketing is fuelled by the need to shout louder than all the noise surrounding us at all times. It's like an addictive drug that loses its effect over time so you need more and more and more. The stock market is also about the perception of value. It should be very obvious to everyone that the stock market is to a large extent controlled by hype and perception of value. There's a lot of money to be gained from convincing everyone else that the stock you have financial interests in is what everyone else should buy. As time go on we become desensitized, so everything needs to turn up a notch. More data collection, more ads. More aggressive marketing strategies. More gatekeeping, more fencing around eco systems. More exclusives. Product longevity becomes shorter and shorter. Repair becomes harder and harder. Prices go up and technology becomes so essential that you don't have a professional or social life without it. To compete in life you need to follow the pack (I mean, if you choose to buy into this system). The philosophy of open source aligns with constructive motivations. You don't win by making the product a sluggish app filled with ads and data collection, forcing accounts, adoption proprietary standards and be constrolled by a manipulative algorithm fundamentally based on the weaknesses of people's psychology. No, you win by making something you yourself would ideally want to use, something that favors the interest of the user and by making the app the product, not making the user into the product. That's the inherent difference between the two. In open source it's not uncommon for users to become developers or contributors. Often because they become inspired to do so and actually feel like it's something worth investing in. The licensing makes it so that if a developer, organisation or company breaks promises, does something malicious or stops maintaining or developing a product, then anyone is free to fork it. Just like when Audacity had the audacity to start collecting data on users, people just forked the product. As well as Simple app suite on Android that was recently sold to a scummy company that only buys up projects and then milk it for money until they move on to the next thing. It resulted in the project being forked and it looks like it'll become better than the original project. THIS is what leads to innovation, not building businesses around making people pay for patents and file for patents they know they'll never use just to keep the competition from developing their products in that direction... Patents is power and makes everything more expensive. People working together, not working against each other. I used to think capitalism was a very good system and that CEOs deserved the insane salaries. To be clear, I'm not against people having a lot of money and wanting to live in luxury, but I also don't care to pay for it. I don't want to throw money at companies that doesn't have your interests in mind. You pay to become a product and when the orange is squeezed dry they move on. Human psychology is easily manipulated and corporations specialize in turning this against us. Nobody have time or energy to spend our little free time researching products or finding better solutions or alternatives. They don't want to spend time switching to something else. And when companies like Apple actively works to make it hard to leave the eco system, who has energy or time for that? People just want to live life, enjoy the little free time they have. So they waste it by being slaves to eco systems and terrible apps and services.
not only that--it's not the purpose of law to make sure you "recoup your costs". Not that it could anyway, as it's so inept and corrupt. It's to do justice--to protect property rights.
@@f__kyoudegenerates People pay for medicine development because they want to heal. Themselfs or others. Fuck the profits. 99% of medicine dev cost is the absurd FDA trials. Fuck those too. Make the approval voluntary. Write on the bottle "NOT FDA approved", doctors can figure that stuff out much better than braindead bureacrates at the DMV. It'll still be illegal to poison people. FDA approval is the license to poison, as we have seen. Also, deferring lifesaving medicine for extra 10 years for millions and millions of people is just monstrous. No you can't fix it within the system. That is the result of the system. Industry develops because they want to do the job with less effort. If someone can copy them? Everyone benefits. If the efficient way is a legal monopoly? Everyone save one suffers. Reverse engineering and implementation is more or less 18 months. That's your natural patent. And after that, you'll have the premium price original, and the poor can get the cheap copy they need and afford. Everyone benefits. It'll not be post scarcity. It'll just lessen it.
Wow! Stephen Kinsella destroyed Epstein's Eristic style of argumentation with numerous examples of evidentiary importance. This debate was one-way traffic from start to finish.
Actually, the biggest benefactors would most probably be the audience, because they would have the access to pieces facilitated, and producers who would have more possibilities to create without the threat of receiving a copyright lawsuit. Regardless, the discussion on "biggest benefactors" is absolutely pointless to answer the question. It's not even an ethical or economic argument, just personal resentment.
@@TheLucasbr152 that is incorrect. Audiences would lose out because you destroy the means of monetization. Small creators will get hit the worst because big corporations can just outright steal their work. You already have access to every conceivable form of entertainment. Copyright doesn't prevent you from buying any thing that's on sale. You do not have the right to access other people's work without their permission. Destroying copyright would quite literally be trampling oh natural rights.
@@FilmmakerIQ I don't see how audiences would be losing out because of a harder competition... They are actually benefitted from it, it's called comparative advantage. The means of monetization wouldn't be destroyed, it just wouldnt protect some people from being copied, but creators could still sell their work, and people could still pay them if they think it's worth it (basically the movie market today, but more and legal). And big corporations are, most probably the more harmed in this process, whereas they possess, relatively, more patents and copyrights granted compared to small business or small creators, as well as resources to afford more lawyers and sue who disrespect their IP. Thus, they are the ones who benefit the most with copyrights and patents lawsuits. "Small creators will get hit the worst because big corporations can just outright steal their work." Copying ≠ Stealing. Stealing involves subtracting. However, when I copy an information from you, you still have the same copy, the same exact content. So piracy it's not stealing. "You don't have a right to access others people work without their permission. Destroying copyright would quite literally be trampling our natural rights." Don't I? Based on what? Intelectual property is not legitimate property, and therefore it's not and can't be a natural right. As mentioned in the video (the first minutes), Intelectual property KILLS, and VIOLATES property rights. Kinsella elaborates on his book: "As should be apparent, copyright and patent seek to prevent the owners of tangible property-scarce resources- from using their own property as they see fit. For example, they are prohibited, under patent law, from practicing patented methods, using their own property, or from shaping their own property into patented devices, even if they independently invent the method or device. Under copy-right law, third parties who have not contracted with the author are prevented from copying or profiting from the author’s original work. Clearly, sellers of novel devices or literary works can contract with buyers to prevent these buyers from reproducing, or even reselling, the item. These contractual webs can be elaborate; a novel writer can license his story to a movie studio on the condition that the studio require all movie theaters to require customers to agree not to reproduce the plot of the movie, and so on. Yet, once third parties not bound by a contract acquire this information, they are free to use it as they see fit. The reserved-rights approach does not change this. Thus, it would probably be difficult to maintain anything similar to our present patent and copyright laws using contract alone." (Against intelectual property, p.55)
@@FilmmakerIQ Still on natural rights, IP can't be a natural right like the right to property is, because IP is not in fact property. It's not naturally scarce. "[O]nly because scarcity exists is there even a problem of formulating moral laws; insofar as goods are superabun-dant (“free” goods), no conflict over the use of goods is possible and no action-coordination is needed. Hence, it follows that any ethic, correctly conceived, must be formulated as a theory of property, i.e., a theory of the as-signment of rights of exclusive control over scarce means. Because only then does it become possible to avoid otherwise inescapable and unresolvable conflict." (Hans Hoppe)
Correct me if I'm misunderstanding. In Stephan Kinsella's example of Harry Potter, he seems to be arguing for what he sees as 'enough profit' for J.K. Rowling. I'm struggling to understand how someone who believes in personal liberty would feel comfortable telling someone else the value of the product they create. Would he feel comfortable having someone who is uninvolved with his life determine the value of his output - without his input? Is this a Libertarian value? If I'm misunderstanding, I'd appreciate clarification.
He is just giving an example of how someone could still profit off of creative works in a post-IP world. No value judgement necessarily, he is just using a number to show that someone can still make a relatively large profit with no monopoly.
I'm not saying it's enough profit. I'm countering arguments by the utilitarians when they say that without copyright you can't make a profit. I'm saying that it's up to every creator and entrepreneur to find ways to profit, but that often, they can, without IP. That's all.
@@nskinsella I can see both of your points. If someone's creation has value - the creator should be compensated. But I could see how an epidemic of copyrights and patents could clog up innovation. Is there a middle ground? How would you feel about the creator keeping 100% for - say - 10 years - then after that their creation can be used by another producer for a licensing fee of 40% - that gets stepped-down to no less than 10% during the lifetime of the producer. At the end of the producer's life, 5% licensing fees go into trust for the family? I'm completely floating numbers - but I'm sure you get the point.
@@DrProgNerd "f someone's creation has value - the creator should be compensated" I do not agree with this at all. Nothing "has value." This is intrincism. No one "should be compensated." This is marxism. No one deserves an income, a payment, customers, whatever. You have to figure out a way to profit in a world of scarcity and competition. ". But I could see how an epidemic of copyrights and patents could clog up innovation." It's not the abuse or epidemic. the system is not "broken." It's the thing itself. Any degree of IP distorts and harms. Just like a minimum wage--even a small minimum wage causes unemployment. "Is there a middle ground?" Between health and poison? "How would you feel about the creator keeping 100% for - say - 10 years - then after that their creation can be used by another producer for a licensing fee of 40% - that gets stepped-down to no less than 10% during the lifetime of the producer. At the end of the producer's life, 5% licensing fees go into trust for the family? I'm completely floating numbers - but I'm sure you get the point." I get the point that you are trying to tweak a socialist system but nothing will fix it except abolition.
"I can't farm if you're going to farm." There it is. The fundamental assumption that cooperation between strangers is impossible. Yes. You can both farm. This world is big enough for all of us.
A response to the fairness question: Copyright law creates an expectation of being paid for writing a book, and that expectation makes people feel it is unfair not to be paid, and thus that the repeal of the law would be unfair. If you compare writing a book to solving an open mathematical problem, solving the math problem is much harder than writing a book. But there is no expectation of getting paid for solving a math problem because there is no law. So the justification for the expectation of getting paid for a book isn't the amount of work, otherwise you'd have that same expectation for math and science. And you can pretty well see, example for example, that the only time there is a moral sense of duty for being paid only occurs when there is also a legal expectation. Examples: clothing designs, recipes, arguments in debates, business strategies: no expectation. Vs software, music, photography, there is an expectation. You could try to argue that copyright perfectly selects what is fair to protect, and doesn't protect the rest, it's a miracle. But the reality is that, it is circular reasoning. The law creates an expectation, the expectation creates a sense of morality, the morality (fairness) is then used to justify the law. Get rid of the law, and your sense of fairness will update accordingly, just like you don't have an expectation of being paid (fairness) for things like math or debates.
Ideas are not made, they're discovered. Just like finding gold. Imagine if the first person to discover gold got granted a monopoly on it. You can't own an idea in another's head, nor is it practical to. Yes, if the first person to discover an idea gains a monopoly on it, then that does incentivize more discovery...but it monopolizes it lol. So that lowers innovation within the idea. For example; someone creates the phone. They gain a patent on the phone, now there's less innovation within the phone market & higher prices from constrained supply. With those higher prices it hurts people's purchasing power, so that can prevent/negate other innovations as well. Also, you have to take into account the arbitrariness of owning ideas. It's not like physical property with clear & defined boundaries. What is a 'phone'? It has a screen on it, so is a computer a phone? No, it's 'smaller', so is a tablet a phone? What does 'smaller' mean? A dial up phone is considered a phone, & it doesn't even have a screen & is definitely not small. Is anything that can 'call' another person a phone? NOBODY KNOWS! And with this arbitrariness it leads to corruption. It leads to huge lawyer battles. It leads to public spending on enforcement & court cases. It wastes valuable court time that could've been spent on actual property rights. For what? Intellectual property isn't property. It's arbitrary government protectionism. If our goal is to encourage innovation, then why not just subsidize it? Seems much more practical & moral, not to mention easily adjustable.
If people dislike copying other's work so much, they won't pay for unoriginal works, and the original artist will always have an ability to collect value for their originality. It's up to the author to sell their product in the way that is move valuable to them than a mere copy would be. You don't have a right to sell CDs under the constitution. You can perform live for money. You can't copy that. You can sell autographs. That's harder to copy. As for technological patents, there's no reason for them except to stifle competition and therefore innovation and improvement. If you want to gain a market edge with your idea, then you'll have to ensure your idea is executed better than the copy cats will implement it. If you can't, then you can hire someone who can. If you fail, then you fail. But you can't say you didn't have a chance to profit. 1st mover advantage is real. quality differences are real. implementation differences are real. every instance of the same idea produces a different product because of the human element, and all the different ways an idea can be transformed into a product.
Here's a thought. I write a book and take it to a publisher for them to help me sell my book in exchange for a percentage of the profits. I didn't catch the attention of the biggest company, but a modest one is getting the job done. I begin to sell the book for $10 a copy. Amazon sees my book is selling, and they begin to sell it for $5.99 and free shipping, and $1.99 for a digital copy. With no copyright law, they don't have to tell anyone that this is ripped off. They can give me credit if they want to without ever having to share profit. Years of research and writing go down the toilet within 2 months and the larger company walks away with basically free money. No incentive for them to create, only to steal. Let's take patent. I make a new widget that has obvious value. I ask around to see if someone will help me produce it. Again, Amazon sees the value in the widget and decides to produce and distribute it before I can even get off the ground. I have already invested into manufacturing, but have not sold anything yet. They sell my product at a lower price than I ever could due to their huge infrastructure and technological advantages. It would destroy every small business that creates.
@@2live4football Do you believe that as an individual or small business you will have any chance of suing amazon for patent infringement? By the time the lawsuit makes it to court you are bankrupt.
@@TribeWars1 if you have any kind of paper trail proving your case, then any good lawyer will take the case and wait for payment until settlement. They know that these are easy to win cases within current law and they will make far more money in the long run. If you take the protection of copyright out, then you have zero chance ever.
We live in the age of patreon and kickstarter, people support their favorite creators in multiple ways. If you're a good writer or musician, you can always make money as people will be motivated to support you through crowdfunding. People seem to forget, Shakespeare didn't need lawyers to sue anyone. He was contracted for his work and he liked what he did for a living. Romeo and Juliet was printed after he died, without payment to his estate. Bach was similarly paid a salary and bonuses by the church and I'd argue Bach is more prolific than any other musician of our age. Both their work is widely used to create derivative work and are adopted to different fields. They have contributed more to the collective benefit of humanity than any dumb apple patent claims about round cornered smartphones, as a result.
Ideas are not made, they're discovered. Just like finding gold. Imagine if the first person to discover gold got granted a monopoly on it. You can't own an idea in another's head, nor is it practical to. Yes, if the first person to discover an idea gains a monopoly on it, then that does incentivize more discovery...but it monopolizes it lol. So that lowers innovation within the idea. For example; someone creates the phone. They gain a patent on the phone, now there's less innovation within the phone market & higher prices from constrained supply. With those higher prices it hurts people's purchasing power, so that can prevent/negate other innovations as well. Also, you have to take into account the arbitrariness of owning ideas. It's not like physical property with clear & defined boundaries. What is a 'phone'? It has a screen on it, so is a computer a phone? No, it's 'smaller', so is a tablet a phone? What does 'smaller' mean? A dial up phone is considered a phone, & it doesn't even have a screen & is definitely not small. Is anything that can 'call' another person a phone? NOBODY KNOWS! And with this arbitrariness it leads to corruption. It leads to huge lawyer battles. It leads to public spending on enforcement & court cases. It wastes valuable court time that could've been spent on actual property rights. For what? Intellectual property isn't property. It's arbitrary government protectionism. If our goal is to encourage innovation, then why not just subsidize it? Seems much more practical & moral, not to mention easily adjustable. Even then, people already have the incentive to innovate to beat theor competition, can simply not spread the idea, & have nondisclosure agreements before distribution of knowledge.
@@marc4770 how is it real property if it necessitates the violation of physical property rights to enforce. By using the state to penalize me for copying and downloading an MP3 with my own computer you are violating MY property rights, not the other way around. That file is just a piece of binary code, you don't own it.
My take coming into this video, is that the system has to be sensible. The timelines long enough to enable innovation, but short enough to allow progress. The ethics I feel is what should set the line. Curious to see what changes after the debate.
So one argues for moderation due to utility. The other argues for consistency and formal evidence of benefit. As a limited government kind of guy, I think I'm for an average of 5 years of IP protection for commercial applications. The practical way I feel is a 10 year limit put into the constitution, and abolishing a ton of regulation so that IPs get used earlier and released to the world earlier as well.
@@nskinsella Wow, the man himself! 😮 Ethically speaking, I think that if copyright and patents would exist, it should last the lifetime of the creator, but that would put an incentive to end the life of the creator. I think the trend of innovation is just getting faster and faster, so that over time, the difference in impact of what is being debated becomes moot.
@@acctsys "I think that if copyright and patents would exist," But that's THE QUESTION. You can't just assume it. That's like saying "if chattel slavery exists, how many weeks vacation should slaves be given?"
Keep copyright laws but reduce the length of them. 70 plus the lifetime of the author is too long. Patents of 20 years is ok but copyright is too long. They can reach over 120 years of protection.
We need to make variations of patents less patent-able. This is a trick corporations like drug companies always use. Perhaps make them shorter. Definitely need to somehow make it impossible for them to digitize everything as an asset and controllable for digital currency purposes. They are trying to do this right now while we are distracted.
Ideas are not made, they're discovered. Just like finding gold. Imagine if the first person to discover gold got granted a monopoly on it. You can't own an idea in another's head, nor is it practical to. Yes, if the first person to discover an idea gains a monopoly on it, then that does incentivize more discovery...but it monopolizes it lol. So that lowers innovation within the idea. For example; someone creates the phone. They gain a patent on the phone, now there's less innovation within the phone market & higher prices from constrained supply. With those higher prices it hurts people's purchasing power, so that can prevent/negate other innovations as well. Also, you have to take into account the arbitrariness of owning ideas. It's not like physical property with clear & defined boundaries. What is a 'phone'? It has a screen on it, so is a computer a phone? No, it's 'smaller', so is a tablet a phone? What does 'smaller' mean? A dial up phone is considered a phone, & it doesn't even have a screen & is definitely not small. Is anything that can 'call' another person a phone? NOBODY KNOWS! And with this arbitrariness it leads to corruption. It leads to huge lawyer battles. It leads to public spending on enforcement & court cases. It wastes valuable court time that could've been spent on actual property rights. For what? Intellectual property isn't property. It's arbitrary government protectionism. If our goal is to encourage innovation, then why not just subsidize it? Seems much more practical & moral, not to mention easily adjustable. Reducing the length of them only negates their meaningless damage.
To the same degree a 70 year copyright law would be enforced with the weight of government behind prosecutorial charges in its own courts, the same degrees would occur with a 20 year patent. In fact, it's because of that enforcement that 20 eventually transitioned to 70, and given the track record of IP with technocrats, assuming 70 (or even 120) would be the hard limit is being too generous. The purpose of such a heavy and arbitrary restriction at all is to add on years, and thus give greater sense of weight to severities of penalty for ultimately causing a State offense for violating State court code.
Blockchain Technology might be a great way to meet in the middle as 3rd party services that build on blockchain can structure their own IP system by supporting original creators over copiers, for example by giving them an emblem of authenticity. People could still support whatever they'd like but most would be more inclined to support the original and because of how blockchain works, it is made much easier to verify who the original creator was without them even needing to make a patent. This would create a very natural market where original creators can still benefit from.
That, or the patenting process itself can be greatly streamlined using blockchain, same with licensing said patents, and what's to say that copyright can't also be modernized that way.
Any discussion about this needs to first realize that the term "Intellectual Property" is highly misleading, since copyright and patents are very different things and reasoning about one doesn't apply to the other.
@@slushisimcambi2521 Mine too. ... and further. Patents on physical inventions which are also a completely different beast than patents on logic and math and stuff where the product it self also under copyright. It is not in any way proved that just because patents seem to work in one area, then they'll also work in another - or that extending the patentable domain is wise.
Absolutely. But looking at their origins, it was clear they were both made to expire after a reasonable length of time. Now, if you have a phalanx of attorneys and the wealth to pay off politicians, they can be made to last several lifetimes. That is the common issue and mechanism by which the laws staunch so much creativity and innovation. Invention relies on previous innovation. Imagine if someone were to invent the sealed bearing or wrote Shakespeare's plays given today's eternal, government-backed patent enforcement. One family dynasty would essentially be gatekeepers of the industrialized world and nobody would know who Shakespeare was (it took two centuries of freely publishing and presenting his work before it finally caught on).
@@wolflarson71 Of course the practical differences are relevant the their utility and thus for whether they should be abolished. At least for patents, a large portion of their justification is that they have utility (a claim without much actual evidence)
With regular property like housing or cars, by using it without owner's pemission, you are going to change his property of deny its use at the time. With "intellectual property" owner is none the wiser to who is using his property and why, and only uses his monopoly power on knowledge to supress competition. That's why natural property rights are necessary.
I create software. I sell it through a broker. I see the exact second that my software goes up on wares sits because my sales take a nose dive. I may not know specifically who is downloading my software, but it has a tangible effect upon the return of my time investment. I am not concerned about competition because I strive for originality, although if other people iterate too closely upon my work, that again steals the fruit of my labour. Why should indivuals or coorporations, especially the Chinese, be able to steal from me like that?
@@Martial-Mat I am also a software developer, but I'm an employee and never sold my own software. Is it possible that switching to a software-as-a-service model would both protect your sales and remove the need for IP laws? (Until someone hacks into your server and duplicates the software - which feels even more like theft :) )
@@Martial-Mat if you set up a lemonade stand in your street, and then I set one up next to you, you'll see your sales drop, am I stealing the fruits of your labour? Copyright is nothing but a prettier version of a guild system
@@noahorr3480 Sotware as a service is the scourge of the industry from a consumer perspective - the concept that customers should have to continue paying you indefinitely for a single creation. I see that as being as immoral as stealing software.
@@komnennos If I invent lemonade, then you steal my creation in order to compete with me, then I'd say that you have behaved immorally and unfairly, especially as it tends to be the companies with the most resources that get to own all the lemonade stands. I don't know what you mean by a "guild system."
Copyright can be fixed. There's a new trend where creators now use their copyright to target social platforms instead of regular people. If social media permits engagements on their work then they have violated copyright, until then they have not. Let's see how these tech tycoons like it. 😂
False question to ask, it does not matter whether or not it gives more innovation or not, the simple fact is that IP infringes on the rights of everyone who owns property to do whatever they please with it meaning it violates everyone's rights. IP must be abolished this instant. IP is not property, it is made up and does not exist in a state of nature where government does not exist.
They are not a bad idea. We just need to roll it back to a modest level. It has gotten completely out if hand in its current state. Especially when you roll it it with trademark law.
That’s not true to my knowledge. The 2008 economics book ‘Against Intellectual Monopoly’ & the 2001 essay ‘Against Intellectual Property’ are the two most important texts of the last century! Each has nearly flawless argumentation. All intellectuals & people interested in art, tech or economics need to read both (free online). If you can’t read them now, then write down both titles so you can tell others so they can read them.
I respect Epstein as a man of intellect, of logic and wit, with an amazing capacity to remember and coherently explain his arguments, as a non-leftist, but the Intellectual Property debate is settled, IP is an absurd concept. No way around it.
Copyright can be fixed. There's a new trend where creators now use their copyright to target social platforms instead of regular people. If social media permits engagements on their work then they have violated copyright, until then they have not. Let's see how these tech tycoons like it. 😂
Creative entrepreneurs sell actually experiences which cannot be fully copied. When they sell a good, the good actually comes with intangibles and services. You go to a drugstore and buy a drug, it is a complete experience of pre-purchase, during purchase, and after purchase. Since experiences are subjective so that every person values them differently, even if you copy the tangibles, the totality of tangibles and intangibles are different to different individuals. Hence the argument of unable to recoup the cost of investment because competitors can simply copy is fallacious.
Doesn't this favor Epstein's position of retaining a limited form of IP controls? If intangibles matter, then the copier not only doesn't have to pay the tangible fixed costs of innovation or novel creation, but also whatever costs go into the intangible experience as well.
Maybe we should not have a competitive market we should be team working to make a better world. Patents blocks improving designs can kill if there's patents on cures.
What has happened is that due to over-reliance on these monopoly protection laws, US has dropped the ball on efficient management systems that also leads to lower lead time for development or design of a new product., along with a more efficient manufacture and deployment of the same product. So US manufacturing firms are always playing catch up to their foreign counterparts. What would happen to drug companies if they lost US patent protections? They will act less like Ford and more like Japanese car manufacturers like Toyota.
the copyright debate is ultimately a debate around what the creation of IP is based on and how long we should have copyright: External Factors (20/effective-infinity years of copyright protecting their work so they "feel" safe to create, like a lab experiment animal) Vs. Internal Factors (the creative and industrial self-determination where regardless of money, fame, fortune or power they create for it's own sake and pleasure) I personally think the latter approach is a better one and like one of them said, "piracy" [aggressive archival] is rampant [and more importantly free-advertising of a product or service]; yet people still create even if they think some of their content gets "stolen"(copied). also if copyright protections are why we create... why do we have Plato, Musashi Miyamoto, Einstein, Nikola Tesla, Sir Isaac Newton, Rene Descartes, Shakespeare, and many others as well as their creative works? before copyright? oh right, because copyright's foundation is censorship and not property rights of the author. Hope you have a great day & Safe Travels!
Copyright can be fixed. There's a new trend where creators now use their copyright to target social platforms instead of regular people. If social media permits engagements on their work then they have violated copyright, until then they have not. Let's see how these tech tycoons like it. 😂
And if you can't have such IP protections, I could open my own businesses named Microsoft, Apple, Google, IBM, Amazon, etc. Why give a "monopoly" on a name since I can't protect my personal name that way?
That is fraud, but you are defrauding the customers, and thus should have to pay them restitution. Trademark law has you paying the companies who name you are using, but you have not defrauded them.
That's a trademark issue not a patent or copyright issue. And by the way trademark law is unjust too, but for different reasons. If you call yourself microsoft you'll soon be sued or go out of business because of all the customers you fool. So it's a dumb argument.
Really? With what? Guns? How many guns can entrepreneurs and small businesses bring against companies like Google? The same company who openly stole the work of Sun, driving them into the ground - Do you think their theft would be any less brazen if IP laws did not exist?
Ideas are not made, they're discovered. Just like finding gold. You can't own an idea in another's head, nor is it practical to. Yes, if the first person to discover an idea gains a monopoly on it, then that does incentivize more discovery...but it monopolizes it lol. So that lowers innovation within the idea. For example; someone creates the phone. They gain a patent on the phone, now there's less innovation within the phone market & higher prices from constrained supply. With those higher prices it hurts people's purchasing power, so that can prevent/negate other innovations as well. Also, you have to take into account the arbitrariness of owning ideas. It's not like physical property with clear & defined boundaries. What is a 'phone'? It has a screen on it, so is a computer a phone? No, it's 'smaller', so is a tablet a phone? What does 'smaller' mean? A dial up phone is considered a phone, & it doesn't even have a screen & is definitely not small. Is anything that can 'call' another person a phone? NOBODY KNOWS! And with this arbitrariness it leads to corruption. It leads to huge lawyer battles. It leads to public spending on enforcement & court cases. It wastes valuable court time that could've been spent on actual property rights. For what? Intellectual property isn't property. It's arbitrary government protectionism. If our goal is to encourage innovation, then why not just subsidize it? Seems much more practical & moral, not to mention easily adjustable.
Ideas are frequently the result of years of effort and cost, focussed upon solving specific problems or limitations, and creators deserve fair recompense for doing so. The fact that they may lack the financial means to manufacture their solution on a grand scale should not be used as justification for stealing that work from them. You seem to have the fanciful notion that inventions simply pop into people's heads as they walk down the street, which is extremely rarely the case when it comes to society-changing inventions. As for patents, they are extremely specific. You don't just say "a device for talking to people at a distance" and that covers every conceivable permuation of a phone. Intellectual property has a tangible cost and a tangible value. Getting hung up on the words "property" is like fixating on the word "new" in the phrase "green new deal." It's entirely the wrong thing to focus on. The public already subsidises innovation at NASA, medical companies, and weapon manufacturers - the latter I disagree with. Where should the line be in terms of subsidising every crackpot idea? If and idea is NOT granted subsidy, does that mean it should not receive protection? Just looking at the epic fails on Dragon's Den, we know for certain that assessment panels get it massively wrong sometimes.
@Mat Broomfield Obviously discovery of ideas can take time & effort. Never said otherwise. They already get rewarded for it by satisfying market demands with said innovation, they can simply not tell their secrets if they so please, & they can make people sign nondisclosure agreements before distribution of knowledge to slow the spread of info. They have plenty of incentive to innovate already. Copying is the nature of innovation. You don't own an (arbitrary) idea in another's head. Not to mention many people can mutually discover ideas. You cannot clearly define the phone. An iphone & a wall mounted dial-up have almost nothing to do with eachother. They're practically different products. The distinction is entirely arbitrary. If there was a patent on 'phones', then that drastically lowers innovation/supply within the 'phone' market, *no matter how you define it.* A computer, walkie-talkie, & moores code are considered a phone under your definition btw. Bit too broad lol. Let me elaborate on my gold analogy; The first person to discover a new metal owns all of said metal (in my hypothetical universe). _This is cool! It rewards those people for discovering!_ Somebody then comes along and is the 'first' person to discover gold. They now own all gold. They restrict the supply of gold heavily, increasing it's price. Innovations within the gold market are now haulted. Jewelry doesn't start to exist. Tools & stuff using gold aren't created. Since the price is higher, people's purchasing power is hurt (especially relative to no complete ownership). This hurts other possible innovations throughout the economy. In the mean time, courts, police, lawyers, & all of their precious time & resources from the public are distributed to the enforcement of maintaining this monopoly. Overall, this is worse for everyone. People already have an incentive to discover. Everything you're saying about subsidization could be said about intellectual property. _It could be given to stupid ideas. How do you know how much is too much? Those ideas are arbitrary._ If the government has the resources to identify & maintain a monopoly on arbitrary ideas who then take huge sums from the public, then they have the resources to identify & fund those ideas. I'm simply offering subsidization as a *substitute* to ip. It serves the same purpose. Encouraging innovation, but at least with subsidization it's direct & adjustable. We can give the people who've built false wealth through IP time to leave that market & slowly diminish the subsidization over time. And all without the monopolistic features of IP.
@@Martial-Mat "Ideas are frequently the result of years of effort and cost, focused upon solving specific problems or limitations" No, the years of effort is the ideas/formulas/etc. that people can come up with but that don't actually work, not that the ideas themselves take years of effort or cost. "You seem to have the fanciful notion that inventions simply pop into people's heads as they walk down the street," Yes, because that actually does happen quite frequently. Ideas are typically combinations of previously existing ideas, and they do sometimes occur in more than one persons head at the same time even, which is one of the reasons there are different views within patent rights about who should own the patent based on timing of submission or invention/etc. "which is extremely rarely the case when it comes to society-changing inventions. " You need to offer some kind of proof or stats, assertion is insufficient. The burden is on you since you are agreeing with a monopoly privilege grant. Further, I think many people can think of many "inventions" that are huge where this is obviously the case, like the wheel, or fishing nets, or the light bulb (which has gone through and will continue to go through iterations and improvements around a basic design) "is like fixating on the word "new" " This is both a good and bad analogy, because "green new deal" was a phrase used to manipulate people into thinking of "good" previous legislation, just like "intellectual property" is used to manipulate people into thinking of copyright like property. The "bad" part is that I don't think that was the intent of your development of this analogy and your original point didn't really make much sense from the opposing perspective, to circle back on that... "has a tangible cost and a tangible value" Art no one wants that therefore does not sell still has a tangible cost, but "no value" .. except that this isn't quite right. That art may be ahead of its time and immensely valuable later on, or it may be really valuable to the kids mom who drew the picture but worthless to others. Value is subjective. Cost and value aren't really related in any way except in the mind of the person who paid the cost or those aware of the cost paid who care. I use the phrase "contribute to what you value" as it concerns "intellectual property" because I believe that is what people ought to do. But it removes this unnecessary connection to cost which should absolutely be a consideration by the person who spent the time making the idea, how can they recoup on their investment, but is not something their customers should need to consider. "The fact that they may lack the financial means to manufacture" It's not just that. They may also not have a fully fledged idea to begin with. Maybe the idea only works if it has the right marketing, the right "killer app" or the right environment that understands it. It is far more complicated than just them not having the financial resources. And these other issues add up to success that has nothing to do with their idea in itself. Success with ideas is like that.
@@Martial-Mat You are arguing that people should get patents because of the effort they put in. By that logic, whoever is most awful at solving a problem should get the monopoly, because that person has to do the most work.
@@CarrotCakeMake What a ridiculous argument. Most inventions don't occur by luck or simply because a genius comes up with it. It needs to be iterated, problem solved, evolved, and developed until it reaches a useable state. Do you think NASA is awful at problem solving simply because it took them years to get to the moon? No, many challenges simply do not yield to quick, inspired, easy solutions. That does not mean that the inventors do not merit protection.
'Sure the current system isn't perfect' is such a lazy strawman. 'Sure torture isn't a perfect solution but' 'Sure trans-Atlantic slavery isn't perfect but' As if anybody was demanding perfection of a great-but-not-perfect system. No, the critique is of severe dysfunction or even deep immorality. I keep hearing that line and it's sleazy.
Copyright can be fixed. There's a new trend where creators now use their copyright to target social platforms instead of regular people. If social media permits engagements on their work then they have violated copyright, until then they have not. Let's see how these tech tycoons like it. 😂
i came upon the topic of copyright abolition in the Pirate Cinema book, which pretty much states that all these movies and other copyright media is the culture of everyone and should be open to use of everyone (the main character was practically a guy who made memes, of a sort, and who ended up getting targeted by the filthy rich media corporations who tried to drown him in fines) the book made a good argument, someone else should give it a read
Hmm. This gave me lots more to think about. No easy answers in real life are there? Patent trolls are are a real drag on society though. Maybe patents need to have some time limit to deliver and not just on paper. One fallacy though, big companies easily overwhelm small patent owners simply because they can afford a lot more lawyers than the little guy. Works in theory, not in practice.
Empirically we can see that "public domain" does not forbid commercialization and competition. See open source software. Massive amount of corporate buy in. Massive competition. While IP is certainly used as a club by some in the space it is not the primary reason people don't copy software. There are plenty of other ways to manage the "bad" parts of not having IP.
the response to land ownership I would offer around 21:30 is a land tax, based solely on acreage. It’s a subscription with your local authorities for certain property-based protections that have a real and tangible cost, that incentivizes maximum efficiency with the use of space.
If I write a book and there are no copyright laws, people can just copy it and sell it for free. There would be no point whatsoever in writing a book except possibly donations. Most full time writers couldn't exist. Any solutions?
Ideas are not made, they're discovered. Just like finding gold. Imagine if the first person to discover gold got granted a monopoly on it. You can't own an idea in another's head, nor is it practical to. Yes, if the first person to discover an idea gains a monopoly on it, then that does incentivize more discovery...but it monopolizes it lol. So that lowers innovation within the idea. For example; someone creates the phone. They gain a patent on the phone, now there's less innovation within the phone market & higher prices from constrained supply. With those higher prices it hurts people's purchasing power, so that can prevent/negate other innovations as well. Also, you have to take into account the arbitrariness of owning ideas. It's not like physical property with clear & defined boundaries. What is a 'phone'? It has a screen on it, so is a computer a phone? No, it's 'smaller', so is a tablet a phone? What does 'smaller' mean? A dial up phone is considered a phone, & it doesn't even have a screen & is definitely not small. Is anything that can 'call' another person a phone? NOBODY KNOWS! And with this arbitrariness it leads to corruption. It leads to huge lawyer battles. It leads to public spending on enforcement & court cases. It wastes valuable court time that could've been spent on actual property rights. For what? Intellectual property isn't property. It's arbitrary government protectionism. If our goal is to encourage innovation, then why not just subsidize it? Seems much more practical & moral, not to mention easily adjustable. Even then, people already have the incentive to innovate to beat theor competition, can simply not spread the idea, & have nondisclosure agreements before distribution of knowledge.
@RicardoAGuitar Demand contractual benefits for your ideas before distribution of your ideas. Temporarily subsidize innovation as a substitute for ip to give people time to leave the ip market. This has the same effect as ip without arbitrary government granted monopolies leading to the problems mentioned in my "wall of text"
Most full-time writers ceasing to exist would be a benefit, not a problem to be solved. Most authors are bad. Most books are bad. Most authors don't make any profit in the current system, and often lose money self-publishing, but keep at the job whether or not they can do it well. Some keep at it because they are deluded into thinking they deserve to be paid well and eventually will be, but more of them care far more about public recognition of their ideas than about remuneration.
@@phamnuwen9442 Martha Steward did prison time for it with no prior criminal record. But it advanced the career of James Comey. James would later turn the 5th floor of the FBI into a political action committee.
one of the few topics i never have been able to make up my mind.... the question that stephan brought up, 130 years or no 0 years... that is the issue i have. Where is the line to be drawn. If you support a line then its just blah
This is a frontier in political economic theory, I feel. As regards to Ethics, maybe the answer should be the lifetime of the creator. The only problem with tying it to life is there becomes an incentive to take that life away. I get the same "this is on the edge" feeling on estate taxes, because the incentive is no longer relevant, and the justification can shift from utilitarian to a more prescriptive morality one.
Regardless of any Utilitarian reasons, the simple idea of intellectual "property" is hilarious. Property involves mixing your labor with elements of nature to make something useful that you now own (or from purchasing something from someone who did so). Ownership means you have exclusive rights to use or dispose of the property as you see fit, as long as doing so doesn't initiate force against another. This is not, in any way, true of an idea. You cannot dispose of an idea that is in someone else's mind. But more importantly, ideas are infinitely reproducible. An example: If I were to take my neighbor's car, my neighbor would have one less car and I'd have one more car (and no bill of sale). Whereas, if I were to see my neighbor's car, and make another one, I would have a good copy of his car, but he'd still have his. I would have mixed my labor with elements of nature to make something useful. I did my neighbor no harm here. Intellectual "property" would be a claim of my neighbor that I "stole" his car even while he still possesses it. Any investigator would laugh in his face! I can't steal something he still possesses! Therefore, any attempt to stop "theft" of intellectual "property" is initiating force against someone. It's actual theft!
Would this mean that land held by someone, but not put to use, would not constitute property? Or would only those parts in active use -- maybe with some reasonable setback from the used part, e.g. a "yard" around a house -- be personal property? Legit questions about your position, not arguments as posed.
@@bloodgain He’s assuming land is personal property, it has an actual physical correlate of an amount of square footage area. What is monopolized in copyrights and patents is the “work” or invention. There is no physical correlate to work or invention, it is an abstract idea. It is impossible to have property in a work or invention as it is just abstract. What IP laws do is it grants people/entities monopolies in the application of the abstract work or invention in EVERYONE ELSE’s property, but also in all matter in general. IP is monopoly over everyone else’s uses of their own property and matter in general. Hope this helps.
Patents only prevent sale of copied products. If you create a replica of an iPhone you'd be allowed to use it or donate it, but you can't brand it and make a profit from it.
@@akashrajkishore No. Use of invention is monopolized too when it is patented. The exception is the exhaustion doctrine. I encourage you to research this
@@akashrajkishore As I said, theft. They stand between 2 willing parties making a profitable transaction (for both). If one owns a thing, then they can dispose or sell the thing as they see fit (that's what ownership means). There is no theft in copying. There is theft in preventing it.
@@user-wl2xl5hm7k If you don't know or aren't made aware of something which belongs to you (or is created by you) and which is actively being taken from you, how does it hurt you?
@@nimbletimplekins7601 Actually, copying without attribution is illegal and is written into copyright law. Though, it is true that it happens daily across the globe, unabated. I guess it could mean there will be no more Edisons, Newtons or Einsteins, but those who are "First to copyright" going forward and attribution will take a back seat to opportunists?
@@merlepatterson Edison copied Nikola Tesla's works, what a TERRIBLE example to use. Copying is a necessary part of life and without it we wouldn't have half the inventions we have today. Hell even computers wouldn't be so advanced as they are now if Bill Gates didn't """steal""" IBM's DOS and vastly improve upon it to make windows
If there were no benefit to the creators, why do creators seek patents and copyrights? Why not just publish it all in the public domain? Because they know they'd be ripped off.
Exactly. I own a business that creates software for law firms to automate their processes. One project I am currently working on has taken me over a year. If someone can just come along and copy/paste all my code and claim it as their own, then I would never do it in the first place.
@@LegalAutomation You almost certainly have contracts with those firms for this software. You would just need to have a resume showing what you've done in the past and testimonials and then from that you would ask for payment in installments as you develop. It is not a requirement for you to have copyright for your livelihood. And you aren't the only software developer here.
Kinsella isn't claiming there is no benefit to creators. His claim is that it's not beneficial on the whole to creativity in general, meaning that by giving benefit to creator 1 now, you are holding up creator 2 from being able to build off creator 1s work. To give another example issue, we have a lot of sequels or remakes these days even when those do not make sense or improve upon the original. One reason for this is that companies need to make these to maintain rights and they'd rather do that than experiment with something new. But if anyone could do this, it would drastically lower the value as people would more quickly tire of this behavior, with exception to the small niche that would want to see 80 different versions of the same story.
@@Korodarn Funnily enough, woke corporate PR and executive committees love the fact that IP exists for reasons of stifling creativity, and lording the stagnation of the free expression of ideas above the wider population. If a lot of people who detested the current trend in PR campaigns saw the connection between franchises they resonate with to IP law, then a lot of energy and effort maybe wouldn’t be as readily wasted in reacting to recycled gaslighting tactics.
@@LegalAutomation As if a law firm would just download some bootleg version of your software from third-party website. Customers like that are usually interested in working with a trusted party and getting support contracts with continuous update streams.
Stephan makes some good arguments. I think the best argument he makes here is that "intellectual property" isn't true property, even by Richard's own definitions. Only a few extreme outliers support truly protecting it like other types of private property, which is a big hint that it's not the same. However, I don't think this is enough to declare that it deserves _no_ protections at all. I'm not entirely sold (yet?) that some protections _with_ quid pro quo, like disclosure and entering the public domain permanently, doesn't help to enlarge the public domain over time. Nor do I (yet?) agree that creative works that are more than simple ideas or truths don't deserve at least some limited protection. I do agree that our current system is horribly broken and corrupted, and that is difficult to resolve as a libertarian with the idea that it should be allowed at all. In most cases, we tend to look at these systems and say if it can be corrupted to this level, it shouldn't be done. However, I'm more of a pragmatist, so I think a broken system can sometimes be replaced with a much less corruptible* one. In some cases, we have no choice politically but to propose an alternative, e.g. UBI vs our current social entitlement programs. In other cases, we have no (non-violent) choice at all; if the current healthcare system has major problems, we can't just do away with it entirely. (* I'd say incorruptible, but nothing is incorruptible, with or without government intervention. The government is just better at that -- corruption, killing people, and not much else.) That said, Stephan is by far the better debater here. Richard is smart and good at writing or giving prepared talks on this, but in terms of pure debate, Stephan won. Richard hardly addressed Stephan's points unless he had prepared material for one. Stephan at least gave me some new ideas on the topic, though Richard's encyclopedic knowledge and reform efforts are impressive. Considering Stephan was supporting the underdog (by far) side of the topic, that's a technical win in my book. I think too many people voted "undecided" up front here, when they really weren't. They might have believed the current system is bad, but they came in believing IP deserved at least some patent and copyright protections.
It's a hard sell stance on a topic, considering what exists now under the monopoly of government is so adversarial to any alternatives that would be solely contractually and market based. NDA's are a better means of keeping to privacy, and establishing an order of business that many people would want. Compared to the involuntary means and methods of the State, they're voluntary in nature as contracts formed in the market. Maybe it's a little similar in situation to center-leftists hearing about the problems of socialized healthcare related to the price calculation dilemma, but their conditioning through sheer time towards a knee-jerk distrust of market forces makes viewing spontaneously emerging alternatives a very slow and laboring process. It's not a one to one comparison really, but as far as mental exercise goes, it's something.
@@Hibernial Yeah, the heavy government intervention in the market has really skewed the layman's concept of market forces. I frequently have to point out that in a true _laissez-faire_ market, there are no corporations as we understand them, so you can't think of things in terms of what "Big Corporate" would do in such a market. That usually helps open up the discussion, at least. And I'm not even in support of true _laissez-faire,_ just something much closer to it. To be fair, even I have a hard time wrangling all the details of the healthcare issue. I sometimes wonder if there's any path to an improved market that removes the worst of the completely rent-seeking insurance industry and allows for anything resembling a free market. More importantly, if we _can't_ find a way to fix our system -- and soon -- socialized healthcare is inevitable. That will become a losing battle, and the fools in the Republican Party will be the ones losing it on our behalf, like it or not -- unless something huge happens with the Libertarian Party's traction even sooner. So we had best also think about what the best -- or least bad -- version of single payer would look like, so at least we're prepared to suggest a good compromise. Otherwise, the Dems will write the system they want, and we definitely won't like it. Ideological purity can be our worst enemy.
Arguably, a major problem with US drug prices is foreign governments failing to recognize US patents in effect by “regulating” drug prices. Thus, the US market has to absorb all the development costs, as the US government fails to take action against foreign infringers.
People make money by creating value. They don't need a monopoly from government to do so. Your failure to understand economics doesn't justify attacking people. The US government already murders plenty of people. Destroying good health care in the US is worse enough. No need to make the rest of the world worse as well.
@@tomhalla426 It's governments that create these insane costs with their regulations. The solution to government created problems is never more power for that government.
@@voswouter87 if you did know the history of drug regulation in the US, you might have a different opinion. While there has been overreach, Thalidomide is a fair reason for the current system.
I am simply not for being completely cut out of my own ideas and production. I dont give a shit about helping the world. If I cant benefit from my innovation, why do it.
People like you are one of the reasons which I.P. should be abolished asap. Your comment could be used to justify any other form of monopoly, and I don't think you would be capable of accepting this inevitable consequence, because in a situation of only monopolies operating, you would be harmed as well as everyone.
@@TheLucasbr152 ...spoken like a socialist. Mine is mine, yours is yours. If mine makes a monopoly, so be it. Patents run out. Copyrights are ALWAYS for sale. You want mine, buy it.
@@thebestblainejohnson Me, a socialist? You are the one here claiming for a personal monopoly, just like a socialist would. Copyrights shouldn't be sold, because there's not a valid reason to it's existence, you don't have a right to stablish a monopoly on your idea. "[O]nly because scarcity exists is there even a problem of formulating moral laws; insofar as goods are superabundant (“free” goods), no conflict over the use of goods is possible and no action-coordination is needed. Hence, it follows that any ethic, correctly conceived, must be formulated as a theory of property, i.e., a theory of the assignment of rights of exclusive control over scarce means. Because only then does it become possible to avoid otherwise inescapable and unresolvable conflict." - Hoppe "It is a peculiarity of property rights in patents (and copy-rights) that they do not arise out of the scarcity of the ob-jects which become appropriated. They are not a conse-quence of scarcity. They are the deliberate creation of statute law, and, whereas in general the institution of pri-vate property makes for the preservation of scarce goods, tending . . . to lead us “to make the most of them,” property rights in patents and copyrights make possible the creation of a scarcity of the products appropriated which could not otherwise be maintained." - Arnold Plant "Bouckaert also argues that natural scarcity is what gives rise to the need for property rules, and that IP laws create an artificial, unjustifiable scarcity. As he notes: Natural scarcity is that which follows from the relation-ship between man and nature. Scarcity is natural when it is possible to conceive of it before any human, institutional, contractual arrangement. Artificial scarcity, on the other hand, is the outcome of such arrangements. Artificial scarcity can hardly serve as a justification for the legal framework that causes that scarcity. Such an argument would be completely circular. On the contrary, artificial scarcity itself needs a justification.Thus, Bouckaert maintains that “only naturally scarce enti-ties over which physical control is possible are candidates for” protection by real property rights.66For ideal objects, the only protection possible is that achievable through per-sonal rights, i.e., contract (more on this below). Only tangible, scarce resources are the possible object of interpersonal conflict, so it is only for them that prop-erty rules are applicable. Thus, patents and copyrights are unjustifiable monopolies granted by government legisla-tion. It is not surprising that, as Palmer notes, “[m]onopoly privilege and censorship lie at the historical root of patent and copyright.” It is this monopoly privilege that creates an artificial scarcity where there was none before. Patent and copyright are good against all third parties, regardless of their consent to a contract. They are real rights that bind everyone, in the same way that my title to a parcel of land binds everyone to respect my prop-erty-even if they do not have a contract with me. A con-tract, by contrast, binds only parties to the contract. It is like private law between the parties.82It does not bind third parties, i.e., those not in “privity” with the original parties.83 Thus, if the book purchaser B relates to third parties T the plot of the purchased novel, these third parties T are not bound, in general, by the original contractual obliga-tion between A and B. If I learn how to adjust my car’s car-buretor to double its efficiency, or if I learn of a poem or movie plot someone else has written, why should I have to pretend that I am ignorant of these things, and refrain from acting on this knowledge? I have not obligated myself by contract to the creator. I do not deny that contractual obligations can be implicit or tacit, but there is not even an implicit contract in such situations." - S. Kinsella (Against Intelectual property) Read his book.
I agree with you. No one has the right to force you to help others. You are a sovereign individual. Although, I do think the current patent system when combined with the legal system, favors big business by a large margin. I would support lowering patent life a bit, but with the same bill I would massively cut regulation. The net result would probably be the same level of innovation, but with small businesses and individuals having much greater successes versus big business/big gov. The main issue is that the current legal system favors whoever has the most capital to dump into their IP case.
@@TheLucasbr152 Patents and copyrights do arise out of scarcity. They take mans labor to conceive and create. We are all mortal beings. A mortal beings labor is a scarce commodity as it is constrained by his lifetime. A humans mind only belongs to themselves. They have the absolute right to never share their invention even if it would benefit many. However as soon as they participate in the market, by selling a device made from their patent, the countdown should start. The market that they participate in is built by people forfeit their own IP in order to have a successful society. I believe the eventual forfeiture of IP is a social contract that everyone signs when they elect to stay a citizen.
Richard is so incredibly naive. He thinks that he can create a system that optimizes things and doesn't understand the political incentives will ensure it is corrupted. I do like that this was a good cordial discussion, despite the fact they have vastly different views.
@@sburn1919 I'm not arguing for the current system, I agree with Kinsella, it should be abolished. Will it cause issues? Yes. But I trust that people can work around any issues because the state of no copyright and patent is the natural state and I trust free people to find solutions without state coercion. None of that is to say things would be perfect or there wouldn't be potential to lose some kinds of projects or innovations. But I care about freedom more than some ill conceived attempt to try to maximize efficiency by regulating society as it depends on the intelligence of a very small number of people who think they understand things they probably don't. And I expect to persuade nobody who thinks like that. It is against their temperament and hostile to their delusions of grandeur about how they can improve society with their designs.
it has been some time I thought about this but the system of copyright should be tied to profit-based length. so you can make some profit from making a new product but after you recoup your investment + some profit the product is no longer protected by copyright this should be different from type to type.
This cannot be justified using any principled arguments. However, even when ignoring that as on objection, it obviously is impossible to actually make your suggestion work in practice. You would need incredible amounts of bureaucracy to keep track of these metrics for every single copyrighted item. This system opens up many many more avenues for corruption than even the current system. Copyright holders would simply find ways to make their "investment costs" look bigger on paper than they are and ways to make their profits look smaller than they actually are.
The problem with patents is mainly in their execution, not the concept. Patents are a wonderful idea, and we definitely SHOULD have patents. That is NOT to say, however, that there aren't TONS of abuses with patents. There are. And those should be addressed. But the idea of getting rid of patents completely is absurd. Who's going to write a book if someone else can simply reprint it and sell it to all your customers? Who's going to be a working musician, coder, writer, artist, inventor, etc.? If a right click, copy, paste, is all it takes to cut you out of your own work, who would ever pay you to do it? The first man said something like "companies will just rest on their laurels after releasing a product" uh yeah, but they invented that product to begin with! The amount of money spent on R&D will be cut by 99% and everyone will just create "steal everyone else's product" departments. Things will be reworked to simply copy and produce as fast as possible, instead of invent. But the idea of a 140 year patent? Sure, that's probably way too long. The idea you can "tweak" the formula and then extend the patent? That probably needs to go. But getting rid completely would be akin to saying "some people are falsely convicted so we should just get rid of the justice system". Should we revamp it? Absolutely, but not get rid of it. That's insane and absurd.
I agree with what you’re saying. The only thing I’d clarify is that patents and copyright are different. Patents are for “Useful Arts” (inventions for example) while copyright is for the “Science” (a novel for example). Yeah, it terms seem like the opposite of what you’d expect.
To the last guy who asked a question... Its only a negative to not have a patent within a patent system... If there was no patent system then your drug would live or die on its own merits not on some government stamp of approval. Laws are illegitimate anyways because government is illegitimate as it must steal to exist in the first place.
That’s what would happen based on my IP knowledge. So after IP abolition, big corporations like Disney or Apple wouldn’t be ripping off smaller artists & inventors. This is because those corporations can’t make money off of copyright-monopolies or patent-monopolies any more. So there would be no incentive for the corporation to use other people’s works. In fact, Disney as a corporation wouldn’t exist any more. Companies that use IP-monopolies to extort money from people would have to instead switch to manufacturing actual (quality) physical products or providing (quality) services- or they’ll face bankruptcy. And IP-monopolies are not products or services.
Though if Disney doesn’t want to provide actual physical products or services after IP is abolished, the company also might be able to float by with donations from people who like the original art they create. It’s just that after IP abolition, Disney won’t be the horrendously rich & powerful intellectual monopolist it is now. And people will be able to freely use and disseminate the ideas & art Disney creates
I couldn't quite follow the argument about the Bayh-Dole Act, so I went to wikipidea to see what is was about. And funny enough there's a section "Effect on academic innovation" which says that 2022 Stanford study was "unable to conclude that higher inventor’s royalty shares have any effect on the number of invention disclosures or patent applications at a university".
I'd say instead of outright getting rid of Patents and Copyrights is : have them for the written blueprints for history sake; however allow ANYONE to use them however also if they do profit off of them they pay 10% profits to the holder for 7 years or such.
This is the mandatory licensing regime that was discussed, which Richard said was untenable in many situations like pharmaceuticals. Although I can see opposing it on libertarian grounds (if intellectual property _is_ property, it should be exclusively controlled by its owner), I think it's one of the weaker arguments on that side. I think this breaks down because Stephan is right that intellectual property is _not_ true property even by the definitions of strong supporters of Richard's position, but something else. That does not automatically mean it should have no protections, but it argues for allowing different treatment than, say, a cow or a piece of land.
Why 10%? Why not let the copyrights owners choose what is more appropriate terms for licensing based on their industry they know better than the gov how their business model works. 10% of 0 dollar is not a lot.
Stephan could have done a lot better by talking about nonrivalrous goods. If I come up with a tune, you whistling it does not prevent me from doing the same.
What if we base copyright on the earnings of the patentet product? So lets say it cost 1 bilion to invent it and at the earning of 200% of the investment the copyright becomes public domain?
That would create more hassle than it’s worth because you need good empirical methods, and spend many resources to apply those methods, to calculate the investment cost. Good empirical methods may not even exist for particular situations. Fully abolishing all 4 types of IP is the neat way to go to mu knowledge. (Btw, you’re only talking about patents here not copyright. Copyright is for creative expression, patents are for invented products or processes)
If all intellectual property was abolished we would probably see companies Pool their resources to develop new innovations. If everyone can benefit from a invention because it isn't patented then everyone is incentiviced to invest in its development. This might even speed up the rate of innovation as inventors can rely on the support of entire industries instead of a single company.
I figured the response would be business secrecy and non-disclosure contacts. If your process if more efficient or effective then holding it secret is more profitable than sharing with competitors.
@@MaaveMaave That might not always be possible, some innovations might be relatively easy to reverse-engineer and can be adopted by competitors. And even competing companies cooperate often in order to save costs. So it wouldn't be strange for them to cooperate on research and development.
Perhaps you're right, pooling resources for R&D yet competing for manufacturing. The pooling itself could be regulated by third parties, similar to how clearinghouses regulated bank issuance under free banking.
@@marc4770 100% correct. Copyright protects information, not ideas, which are two completely different things. It's sad how many people don't get this.
@@marc4770 yeah and by copyrighting the execution of an idea you are violating property rights by using their own physical property to carry out those ideas. IT IS NOT A PROPERTY RIGHT, IT IS A MONOPOLY GRANT
Putting aside the natural rights position that doesn’t seem to favor IP, this debate seems to come down to empirical studies. Epstein has a lot of convincing anecdotes while Kinsella provides conclusions by authors/studies that doesn’t seem to support IP in regards to benefitting society. It's hard to evaluate when there are so many counter-factuals in play as well as short term vs long term results if IP was abolished.
IP is a recent invention: barely 200 years old. Humanity survived without it for millennia, and still managed to produce most of the greatest ideas in history.
@@daveBit15 Looks at the human progress chart that spikes around 200 years ago. ;-) I'm sure some IP defenders would point to that as a contributing factor.
@@daveBit15 I own a business and create software for law firms to automate their processes. If intellectual property rights did not exist and anyone could copy/paste all my code that takes me years to create, then I would never have created it in the first place.
At the very least, patents are way too long and interpreted way too broadly. There might have been reason for 20 year patents back in 1787, but not now. If you can't get it to market and recover development costs in seven years, you don't have any business holding on to it.
What is more valuable? A novel? Or the paper it is printed on? Does it really make sense to, in essence, socialize some of the most valuable property that exists?
You're begging the question by calling it property. It's not limited in the same way--when you share an idea, you don't have to give up its use the way you would a tool or land.
What is the value of innovation? What is rewarded and how? The answer to these questions shapes how and why these activities are performed. Is the value of an innovation how many dollars can be extracted from a society or to improve the ways and means of life for a society?
It's possible to be anything. And you can be anti-patent for most things but pro-patent specifically for pharmaceuticals. The issue is you have to realize whatever fancy ideas you have, they have to go through the political system. Good luck getting them to look anything like you wanted at the end of that, and even if you do, wait a few years.
Yes. That is the position Henry George ended up with, although he originally opposed both forms of monopoly and continued to think that the copyright terms were a bit too long and too restrictive of derivative works even in the mid 19th century.
@@nskinsella The main way I think of is if there was simply a non profit organization in charge of it all or something. And every company would have to sign off on it or something. But it'd be voluntary to join, making it pretty useless for enforcement. It'd have to just be a voluntary government for patents to exist. The problems at least aren't that unique to it
@@Boristien405 That's not what patents are. Patents are in rem rights--real property rights, good against everyone in the world, not based on contract. You are thinking of a contractual regime, an in personam based system. That is not what IP is. To take an extreme, clear example: A and B agree to some arrangement where B is limited in how it can use information A gives B. that is not IP because this contract between A and B cannot prevent C from using the information as it sees fit. I.e, contracts don't bind third parties. IP does. Moreover, any contractual regime you can think of is going to be very limited and usually impracticable, for similar reasons as to why cartels can't work on the free market. Imagine Amazon, at the behest of authors, requires all its customers to sign an agreement when they buy a book, not to ever copy the book. Well, first, that agreement would only bind Amazon's customers. IF one of the customers copies the book anyway and uploads it to the Internet; or if he gives or sells the book to a third party, then third parties can copy this information since they didn't enter into any contract with Amazon. Moreover, imagine a customer B who buys a book for $10 from Amazon, and is forced to sign a contract promising not to copy the book (or make derivative works, etc.). Now he is buying the book *instead of* just grabbing a pirated copy from Z-library or whatever. HE is one of the people actually giving money to Amazon, and to the authors. You are adding on to the $10 cost of the book, a legal contractual liability. That imposes a cost on the customer. That alone makes them less likely to buy the book--instead of that hassle, they might just pirate it instead. Now this contract can either impose small fines, say, $20, $100, for breaking the contract; or it will impose large fines, say $1M or more. If it imposes a small fine, many customers will just copy the book and pay the small fine. So that won't stop copying. The only way you can really dissuade copying, is to impose huge fines. But that will mean even fewer poeple will buy books from Amazon. Why would I pay $10 for a book and agree to a $1M possible lawsuit? Fuck that. So.. .these models cannot work. The reason they can't work is the nature of information--it's easily copy-able. which means the "authorized" copy of the book from Amazon is not their only source, so they don't have to agree to onerous terms to get the book; they can just get the pirated copy instead. So I think in a free market with no copyright, services like Amazon will exist and people will pay a bit more for convenience and to know they have an "authorized" copy (and to know the author is getting some payment)--just as people will pay more for name-brand Tylenol than for generic acetaminophen. But they won't pay *that* much more: they might pay $1 or $3 or $5 or $10 for a kindle version of a book for convenience, instead of the hassle of finding a pirated copy; but they won't also "pay" the cost of assuming a $1M legal liability! So if you are an author or book seller and you want to persuaded peopel to buy your books when they *don't have to* (since piracy is rampant and fairly easy) you have to give them something *extra* (like: convenience; ease of use; the quality seal of authenticity etc.) NOT an additional cost like a huge contractual liability penalty clause! The whole thing is ridiculous. IP can never work, not even contractual simulations of it.
That's not how invention happens anyway. It's usually a "flash of genius" a novel combination of previously existing ideas the person was exposed to by virtue of being near other people and other ideas that were necessary for their new concept to form. And none of that is to say it isn't a valuable result that deserves compensation. But compensation does not require a monopoly privilege grant. Entrepreneurial insight gives far more options than that. Some inventors who have no idea how to market their product may not be able to make money because of that, but this is like the artist who can't find his niche market or tablet pcs that existed before iPad. Sometimes the idea is ahead of its time.
@@Korodarn I hold two patents and work for a firm that has hundreds. You don't at all know what you are talking about. Patents are literally classified as new inventions or improvements on existing product. Both have different rules and protections. A patent doesn't give you a monopoly. It gives you a time period to expand and profit off of your invention before someone can copy you. If your product can be produced differently or with slight alterations then those would not fall under the patent. Seriously, it is sad how so many people think they are coming up with revolutionary ideas when that was the norm for most of civilization. Patents are a relatively new idea and this idea pulled us out of the dark ages and into the industrial revolution.
@@Korodarn P.S. the IPad probably has has over a thousand patents protecting different parts and programming. And yes it builds off of and uses some software and parts from previous products. All owned by Apple. And Apple creating different coding to produce the same functions is proof it is not a monopoly. Just an example of how little you understand about patents.
Why assume that? Many probably got it because the city forces it. That they complied doesn't mean they agreed with the mandate. Also, even if they did comply voluntarily, people can have different opinions than you on some things and still be right on other things. It's just stupid to think people can have no good ideas because they have bad ideas on something else. *And I don't agree with you about the vax either, as another person who refuses to take it due to the mandates - but thinks it might have a minor benefit to me (as someone who had and already recovered from COVID - I still see the evidence showing small benefits from having it for people in my risk category - even considering the small risks of heart issues on the other side - but I don't tend to have allergy issues ).
I really wanted to be sympathetic with Kinsela, but I couldn't help but get the impression he's a guy who doesn't really believe in the case he's making deep down, like a debate challenge in school when you're forced to take one side regardless of whether or not you really think it's true. However, I do think copyright should not be life of creator plus 70 -- that's insane -- it should just be 50 years from initial date of publication/release. Giving a writer, musician, artist, etc, half a century to make money off their work is more than enough.
He doesn't really believe in making this utilitarian style argument. He prefers the principled propertarian approach that he's written about extensively elsewhere. But he absolutely believes that IP as a whole should be abolished. Kinsella is an anarcho-capitalist, so there would be no state to enforce IP if it were up to him, and he does not think it could be re-created through contracts because he thinks valid contracts conform to title transfer theory and not mere promises. *What title transfer theory basically means is that you can't use force to make someone fulfill any promise. You can only go after the other party for property that you transferred over to them. And nothing like the current system could be supported under that limitation.
@@Korodarn Got it. Thanks for explaining the nuance on that. I need to look up Kinsella's ideas and arguments and go deeper into his principles. Like I said, I'm generally sympathetic but I do think a balance needs to be struck as the current copyright and IP laws are onerous.
23:14 It would only cost a billion dollars to develop a drug in the presence of immense subsidies offered to competitors, as well as with the inflationary effects of preventing the individual researchers from learning their specialty at work as opposed to paying inflated tuition rates just for a chance at an internship. It’s expensive to pay a scarce industry professional full-time, unless you have pool of cheap interns who do the grunt work. But due to government grants, university education places a choke on educated workers, who are effectively released into the labor market as the sole discretion of government due to the insurmountable cost created by governmental ‘assistance.’
The fact that Chinese industry doesn’t observe copyright is really to their benefit and is part of the reason why and how businesses and manufacturers from elsewhere do business in China. The other part of it of course are the taxes and IP systems that exist in countries with regulations increased by governments, which push businesses away from their domestic markets. If you already know the CCP are the foremost statists of the day, and statists like them in governments across the globe ultimately see eye to eye with them evidenced by a widespread war in viruses regime, then it shouldn’t be a stretch to realize how people in elite circles will ultimately side with each other versus letting anyone else live independently from their political oversight and control.
Patent drug have terribly harm the response to the pandemic, without disproportionate patent incentives early treatment would have been deployed much earlier.. actually early treatment is still not a thing in most western countries. absolutely insane.
@@PropertyandFreedomSociety I'm not even American bro. Also I know a waste of time to when I see one. Also most tech companies sell their copyright whatever to other companies at a price. So still an incentive to create.
If the man who invented the wheel got a patent on the distribution and production of wheels in what reality would that provide an incentive to create? What an insane notion you just put forward, maybe think for 5 seconds before you repeat garbage sloganeering from the monopolist rightsholder class. Patents and copyrightd HALT human progress by monopolizing ideas, things that are neither scarce nor a physical resource, in the hands of a select few rightsholders, not allowing anyone to use these ideas to further innovate. Creativity doesn't exist in a vacuum, every invention is based off of inventions that came before it. Without the wheel we wouldn't have cars, without fire we wouldn't have the combustible engine, without spears we wouldn't have bows or swords or firearms, etc.
Yes but that doesn't justify its existence, IP is not property, someone copying your work is not theft, it does not matter that it does create an incentive to make things a law should not exist where it violates your own property, IP stops people from using their property in anyway they see fit. Copyright blocks innovation more so than it does help invent it in the first place. IP must be abolished, with IP abolished, pornstars would have to look for real jobs now as all their stuff would be stored onto a server where it's free to access because enough people will donate to keep it up and operational, meaning almost no one would ever pay for porn again and those useless whores will actually have to get a real job and same with onlyfans females they'll also have to get a real job as someone could hack into onlyfans and upload all the content onto the server. You would also have a community of people uploading the videos onto that website and server. It will be the best way to discourage degenerate whorish behaviour as it will be punished. They deserve nothing less. But for things like music, video games, movies, tv shows, if they're good you should pay for it as they have real jobs. You are a bad person if you don't pay for that stuff, if however you pay for porn videos you are actually a bad person, they do not deserve money all their content should be for free. Always pirate porn never give them a dime. This would be a utopia.
Copyright and trademark laws have to be enforced. If someone or another company can just rip off all your hard work, where is the incentive? The little guy will never have a chance. Furthermore, preventing copy cats and "fakes" ensures quality and safety. Think about if you think you are buying brand name protective gear for example, the cheap knockoff that looks like the real deal and even has the same logo, then you have an accident and it doesn't protect you. Maybe reformation of the laws, but not abolishment, that's crazy.
Brand protection and copyright are completely different things. What do you mean "rip off all your hard work?" If it was so hard, why is it so easy to rip off? If it's easy to rip off, then it should be!
@@drewp.weiner2473 defferentiation is something to consider though. What if all the IP is copied. Consumer can actually sue the quality producer and not the rip off. Liability also comes into question
I agree, even in the industry, competiotion will diminish, innovation will be stagnant or diminish. The risk of liability will increase even more for well established companies. And there would be little differentiation in the end product or service.
@Andre Catenani I don't see it that way. If I can patent it, that protects me or my invention from the deep pockets who could just take my idea to market immediately, whereas I would have to fund raise, etc. Having a copyright and a patent ensures the little guy has a chance.
another example of bad patent use:
in India they mix several patented cancer medications and have way better results. but when India entered some economic contract with the EU they banned all those mixes.
Most innovation is a collaboration between the brightest minds. We live on the shoulders of giants. Giving the monopoly of ideas and technology to a Multinational corporation will never help to the most of humanity.
EU is a globalist cancer.
Good points. The 2008 economics book ‘Against Intellectual Monopoly’ & the 2001 essay ‘Against Intellectual Property’ are the two most important texts of the last century! Each has nearly flawless argumentation. All intellectuals & people interested in art, tech or economics need to read both (free online). If you can’t read them now, then write down both titles so you can tell others so they can read them.
In Seattle there was a coffee shop called Starlucks, it was older than Starbucks, Starluck was the guy's last name (provision for conflicting names if it's your name), and Starbucks sued him out of existence.
Hey, this debate was MY idea, not yours! I’m suing!
Exactly! Unfortunately this absurdity is what perhaps most of law has come to today. And it also fully permeates our culture with the oligopolist IP propaganda we continue to be incessantly bombarded with.
The 2008 economics book ‘Against Intellectual Monopoly’ & the 2001 essay ‘Against Intellectual Property’ are the two most important texts of the last century! Each has nearly flawless argumentation. All intellectuals & people interested in art, tech or economics need to read both (free online). If you can’t read them now, then write down both titles so you can tell others so they can read them.
Epstein's claim that patents protect small companies from large companies is hilarious.
Yet it does.
@@joanofarc33 No It doesn't. Watch the debate, Kinsella refutes that.
@@joanofarc33 How do you mean?
The reason for failure is not due to the IP protection system itself, but rather the shortcomings of the justice system.
@@acctsys No the reason is, if an adult is fighting a child, giving them both swords does not help the child, it just makes the fight fatal.
A small company may threaten with 1 patent, then the large company will bury them with 100 related patents. It's the reason why there are 3 cell phone manufacturers: Samsung, Nokia, Apple, which is Asia, Europe, US, so basically 1 per legal region; so few car manufacturers, so few medicine manufacturers. The idea that patents help small companies is a myth. If patents help new companies, then the old companies would be campaigning against them, not for them.
Patents are the invocation of monopoly. There is no right way to do the wrong thing. End patents.
as a musician, yes. i always make my music royalty free so people can sample it how they please
Based.
But other people shouldn't be able to patent your stuff
Good for you.
I think artists should recieve their compensation BEFORE their work is released so that way people know whether or not fans were satisfied enough to stay loyal or not.
That's great. More and more artists should allow other people to freely use their works.
A lot of culture is built off of the past, and a fresher public domain means that culture can build off of fresher past works.
This was a very enlightening debate. I have actually changed my position on this topic. I use to be in support of IP and CR, but now I can see that IP is just a tool of monopolists to limit competition and stifle innovation. The drive to incentivize seems to flourish when it is left to free-market forces; not when it is impeded upon by legislative restrictions (statutes and patent licenses). Basically, systems that eliminate competition suffer due to the limitations of the instituted patent. Non-contractual exclusivity results in poor efficiency because the chance to improve such inefficiencies becomes illegal. I would posit that a patent-free world would alter the way idea creators profit and it would increase the development-rate of such a society.
Smart man. The anti-IP argument is not that hard to see. But you need intellectual honesty to be willing to see it. Good on you.
Kinsella changed my mind the same way too. I can’t imagine thinking otherwise.
Open source ecology marcin jakubowski
Have fun
Intellectual Property is like Social Justice - if you have to put a modifier before Property or Justice, it's not Property or Justice.
I would agree, if there is a level playing field like with copyright because everyone has the ability to be creative, same goes with Software patents. With physical patents a competitor can just copy your product without the expense R&D phase. There has to some way to counteract this, but it can't me as broad that you can patent anything. The same goes with social justice. If schools are funded through property taxes and parents can't choose schools then the playing field becomes unfair as low income areas get poorly funded schools and therfore can't as especially escape poverty. It's just that school choices is a much better solution than discriminating based on income or even race.
Invisible Property 😂
@SparrowEgg Private property is the only legitimate property, read Rothbard and Hoppe
The CCP agrees. They stole nearly every single piece of tech they now possess.
@@jonathonbridges9625 Yeah I agree, all state/public property is stolen
I love that he used pharmaceuticals as an example of how patent laws work great.
The man sounded like Keynes touting that inflation is a sign of economic success. Tsk tsk. It’s a symptom of engineered scarcity and planned obsolescence!
Professor has all these neat theories of how things are supposed to work under the guidance of the conditions he dictates as a premise. Unfortunately for him, as studies backed with empirical evidence demonstrate, none of them have basis in actual practice. It's mind boggling that in light of the weight of the information he's presented, he won't entertain the idea that his theories might be pseudoscience at best.
He says it cost a billion dollars to invent a product but is not looking deeper. If all the processes of getting to the outcome of the finished drug don't have the stifling legal limits in the first place, the free market might be able to produce that same drug for 10K dollars; some of the medical equipment have enormous costs because of the very laws he's suggesting help to save us money in the long term make them artificially expensive.
Collective learning is good evidence as to why patents and copyrights should be abolished
The invention of a tv was not all at once
It was a cumulation of many inventions
have fun watching and reading work after work full of product placements, agendas, shilling etc. It's already bad enough with protected works. Xnaying copyrights will ruin art
If it's impossible for the ordinary citizen to enforce, the it needs to be rethought. Too bad this is the opposite of the current system. Most systems start out with the best of intentions though. One reason why regulatory capture is a thing.
Yes, this is very true. If it requires a system to enforce and not an individual, then it is something where the costs and burdens rest on "other people" who often don't even know of the specifics and you can never really weigh the benefits vs the costs because value is subjective and cannot be compared in some mathematical way.
My grandfather (who is a son of Chinese immigrant) once said "why China lost its technological advantage to the West? Because in China we had no IP/patent. The old masters jealously guard their knowledge, their secret techniques. Sometimes an old master carry his best knowledge/technique to the grave, while in the West you need to publish your secret technique to obtain IP. You still profit from your secret, while forcing others to innovate".
IMO IP is critical, it foster *innovation* from both sides: the one who own the IP could recoup his investment, thus allowing him to continue research, and those who want/need the IP but somehow can't get the license will innovate around it.
@@Korodarn The state is a system where "other people" (police officers and judges) defend the property of individuals they usually have no prior knowledge of.
Value in the economic sense is to some extent subjective, but rights, including property, is not. Rights are objective.
@@Korodarn See now that’s just untrue. We can both agree on the state being an improper mediator but who’s to say but if I build a website and hosted on Amazon that Amazon couldn’t be the moderator to make sure nobody was copying what I’m doing? That would be a system and as an ordinary person I wouldn’t have the power to stop it but I also wouldn’t be empowered to create it in the first place
@@phamnuwen9442 Please tell me your username is based on the character from Vernor Vinge's _Fire Upon the Deep._
The success of open source software exposes the stifling nature of IP/CR.
Note that the little guy gets no real benefit from patents because you are forced to find the person who is infringing it (and you can only guess at it as you'll likely have no clear proof), then hire lawyers to prosecute the patent against them, costing millions and having no clear outcome.
Through and through, IP in practice seems only good for propping up ponzi schemes. With the rise of digital technology I’d think it’s just entirely outdated, and not that it was defensible to begin with seeing to what it has inevitably lead into in the current day. Technocrats love it.
The little guy should seek investors to put his patent into use.
What's the point of applying for patent if you are not gonna use it, you could just make it public domain.
@@Hibernial Well, you can choose to use tech with free/open license. However, most business and corporations choose proprietary solution because they need *support* from the developer/inventor.
If you want to use certain proprietary tech, or artwork, or music for your project/business, but for whatever reason you don't want to pay for it, you are forced to *innovate,* to create something else to substitute it.
So, even in this situation, IP actually foster innovation: You need to innovate around it, and invent something that's just as good, or better than current IP.
This is absolutely not true. The little guy gets the benefit of a new product. I own a business that creates custom software for law firms to automate their systems. It takes me years of work to do this work. If any old Joe can come along and copy/paste my code and sell it for 1/20th of the price, then I won’t create the code at all because I wouldn’t be able to make any money on it.
@@LegalAutomation Hold up, that sounds like you are getting custom orders and each piece of code you write goes to the company that requested it and you yourself don't find much of a way to reuse it in the first place because its created for the specific law firm. I.e. even if any old Joe came and copied your code, they wouldn't be able to find a use for it because it's created for a certain system with its own idiosyncrasies. Do I misunderstand?
"Without IP protection, you wouldn't get books or knowledge... Except that which was created before IP protection."
Maybe the point of life is to share?
The thing is you don't have to "share" ideas because they're infinitely abundant and not a scarce physical resource
@@nimbletimplekins7601 bad habit. Is there a better word? Maybe "steward"?
@@bgiv2010 copy, as copying is the fundamental principle of not only computing, but life itself. Cells reproduce by copying, and so does code on a computer
@@nimbletimplekins7601 hey! Don't pigeonhole me: I'm not just into computers! I know artists are master copy cats, too! Capitalism makes copying seem dirty but that's all I want to do. You're absolutely right.
What about trust? Leaving oneself open to imitation could be risky.
Fascinating discussion. It's hard to get your mind around abolishing intellectual property rights but in large part that's probably because we just grew up with it as a "fact of life" sort of thing
Copying is not theft.
Stealing a thing leaves one less left
Copying it makes one thing more;
That's what copying's for.
Copying is not theft.
If I copy yours you have it too
One for me and one for you
That's what copies can do
If I steal your bicycle
You have to take the bus,
But if I just copy it
There's one for each of us!
Making more of a thing,
That is what we call "copying"
Sharing ideas with everyone
That's why copying is FUN!
The best argument for copyrights. In my opinion.
@@UniqueisUnity so you WANT to stifle innovation and human progress?
@@nimbletimplekins7601
Interesting take that argument with an east asian country that literally takes anything for profit without respect for property rights and copyright laws
I worked so hard to make something then they copy it and exploit it my creation for easy profit
Copyrights should always exist.
@twiet ter china went from an agrarian backwater sh!thole to the world's industrial center in the span of 50 years because they don't give a fvck about your intellectual """property""" laws. Now they make almost everything you use on a daily basis, sounds like it worked out pretty good for them.
Monopolies aren't property rights and you do not have a right to control what other people do with their own property, seethe cope mald gweilo.
Copyright can be fixed.
There's a new trend where creators now use their copyright to target social platforms instead of regular people.
If social media permits engagements on their work then they have violated copyright, until then they have not.
Let's see how these tech tycoons like it. 😂
1st dude... there's no evidence to support what we've been doing out of momentum and possible villainy.
2nd dude... I reject your demand for evidence. Have some speculation and assertion instead.
Can you give some evidence?? I thought he did well in the second speaking.
I'm from Argentina, studying in the National University of La Plata. We are working on an "open and free" patent system, not to replace nor Abolish the current copyrights and Patents. We need and we WANT the possibility to choose if we want to patent in the "classical way" or in "an open way", we want to create a community, like GNU/Linux, Creative Commons licence for patents, Wikipedia, Blender, and more.
Man I never heard of that. Is this supposed to be a law project that'll go to congress or what? I'd find that quite odd if that's the case because neither of the two greatest parties are very pro-competition and rather prefer monopolization and protectionism.
@@buriedunborn I have no idea how to do this. I know the main organization that promotes this is the WIPO. It's a project I'm doing for my University. Still on progress ... and I'm not an attorney, I'm studying engineering.
Wow, that's interesting. Some places in the world have minds that are 100 years ahead of the current time we're in now. Small glimpses of a possible future is neat to know about.
@@Hibernial Nah fam, like 60% of people in Argentina are stuck in the 1920s pretending that massive state intervention on the economy is a good way forward.
I personally believe that the world would be better off if it was structured more like open source. Instead of everyone fighting to get ahead of everyone else and make money off of everyone else, we'd work together from the realization that collaboration is what creates great things.
Companies are just singular entities made up of groups. The system is structured in such a way that you need to fend for yourself to get by. You can't rest, because your competition doesn't rest. And actively competing doesn't mean they're competing for the consumers, they compete for themselves at the expense of everyone else. To corporations, people are the food. As companies grow larger and larger, they want more food. Never enough. All affect everything else, nobody can "chill" because then you lose market share and go bankrupt. The arrow must go up, always.
But as it turns out, open source communities are also groups. But the structure is inherently different which makes them act differently as well.
Capitalism as it is today favors profitability over basically everything else. In theory, people could "vote with their money" but this is the biggest lie of all time. Ask ANYONE to switch to an alternative product or service and they'll say no. They'll go to great lengths to avoid the slightest inconvenience. To make a switch it requires you to actually understand other eco systems, products, services and how you could do the things you want to do there. But most of all, it requires that all your friends (and other systemic networks or groups) also follow along. Nobody wants to be the first one and nobody wants to miss out.
I've realized that I don't want nor need to be in these prisons. Sometimes missing out is a relief. I haven't escaped all the prisons, but there's a long list of things I'd never buy, use or install. It's a decision and more and more people are moving away from toxic technology. The more people adopting the open source philosophy in all corners of live, the better. I've found that there are open source enhancements and features I can't live without, but in a positive way. If someone tried convincing me to move from Linux to Windows, I'd laugh from happiness knowing that the switch was one of the best things I did. They'd just remind me of that.
Remember, it is never about making the best product, it's about making everyone believe it's the best product. They do this by pouring money into marketing and market manipulation. It's not always a bad thing, but there are huge flaws in this model. The need for marketing is fuelled by the need to shout louder than all the noise surrounding us at all times. It's like an addictive drug that loses its effect over time so you need more and more and more. The stock market is also about the perception of value. It should be very obvious to everyone that the stock market is to a large extent controlled by hype and perception of value. There's a lot of money to be gained from convincing everyone else that the stock you have financial interests in is what everyone else should buy.
As time go on we become desensitized, so everything needs to turn up a notch. More data collection, more ads. More aggressive marketing strategies. More gatekeeping, more fencing around eco systems. More exclusives. Product longevity becomes shorter and shorter. Repair becomes harder and harder. Prices go up and technology becomes so essential that you don't have a professional or social life without it. To compete in life you need to follow the pack (I mean, if you choose to buy into this system).
The philosophy of open source aligns with constructive motivations. You don't win by making the product a sluggish app filled with ads and data collection, forcing accounts, adoption proprietary standards and be constrolled by a manipulative algorithm fundamentally based on the weaknesses of people's psychology. No, you win by making something you yourself would ideally want to use, something that favors the interest of the user and by making the app the product, not making the user into the product. That's the inherent difference between the two.
In open source it's not uncommon for users to become developers or contributors. Often because they become inspired to do so and actually feel like it's something worth investing in.
The licensing makes it so that if a developer, organisation or company breaks promises, does something malicious or stops maintaining or developing a product, then anyone is free to fork it. Just like when Audacity had the audacity to start collecting data on users, people just forked the product. As well as Simple app suite on Android that was recently sold to a scummy company that only buys up projects and then milk it for money until they move on to the next thing. It resulted in the project being forked and it looks like it'll become better than the original project. THIS is what leads to innovation, not building businesses around making people pay for patents and file for patents they know they'll never use just to keep the competition from developing their products in that direction... Patents is power and makes everything more expensive. People working together, not working against each other.
I used to think capitalism was a very good system and that CEOs deserved the insane salaries. To be clear, I'm not against people having a lot of money and wanting to live in luxury, but I also don't care to pay for it. I don't want to throw money at companies that doesn't have your interests in mind. You pay to become a product and when the orange is squeezed dry they move on.
Human psychology is easily manipulated and corporations specialize in turning this against us. Nobody have time or energy to spend our little free time researching products or finding better solutions or alternatives. They don't want to spend time switching to something else. And when companies like Apple actively works to make it hard to leave the eco system, who has energy or time for that? People just want to live life, enjoy the little free time they have. So they waste it by being slaves to eco systems and terrible apps and services.
The need to recoup development costs is largely a red herring .Computers are making development costs progressively cheaper.
not only that--it's not the purpose of law to make sure you "recoup your costs". Not that it could anyway, as it's so inept and corrupt. It's to do justice--to protect property rights.
Cheaper still isn't free. Also you can't just toss out 'computers are making development costs cheaper' - it varies a lot depending on the industry
@@MA-go7ee Came here to say just that. A lot of people grew up watching Star Trek TNG and think the post-scarcity society is just ahead
@@MA-go7ee Why would it be free?
@@f__kyoudegenerates People pay for medicine development because they want to heal. Themselfs or others. Fuck the profits. 99% of medicine dev cost is the absurd FDA trials. Fuck those too. Make the approval voluntary. Write on the bottle "NOT FDA approved", doctors can figure that stuff out much better than braindead bureacrates at the DMV. It'll still be illegal to poison people. FDA approval is the license to poison, as we have seen.
Also, deferring lifesaving medicine for extra 10 years for millions and millions of people is just monstrous. No you can't fix it within the system. That is the result of the system.
Industry develops because they want to do the job with less effort. If someone can copy them? Everyone benefits. If the efficient way is a legal monopoly? Everyone save one suffers. Reverse engineering and implementation is more or less 18 months. That's your natural patent. And after that, you'll have the premium price original, and the poor can get the cheap copy they need and afford. Everyone benefits.
It'll not be post scarcity. It'll just lessen it.
Wow! Stephen Kinsella destroyed Epstein's Eristic style of argumentation with numerous examples of evidentiary importance. This debate was one-way traffic from start to finish.
This whole debate has been one of rhetoric vs evidence as Epstein plays the role of the demagogue while Kinsella has to be grounded in reality.
If copyright were abolished the biggest benefactors would be the biggest corporations because they own the means of distribution.
Actually, the biggest benefactors would most probably be the audience, because they would have the access to pieces facilitated, and producers who would have more possibilities to create without the threat of receiving a copyright lawsuit.
Regardless, the discussion on "biggest benefactors" is absolutely pointless to answer the question. It's not even an ethical or economic argument, just personal resentment.
@@TheLucasbr152 that is incorrect. Audiences would lose out because you destroy the means of monetization. Small creators will get hit the worst because big corporations can just outright steal their work.
You already have access to every conceivable form of entertainment. Copyright doesn't prevent you from buying any thing that's on sale.
You do not have the right to access other people's work without their permission. Destroying copyright would quite literally be trampling oh natural rights.
@@FilmmakerIQ I don't see how audiences would be losing out because of a harder competition... They are actually benefitted from it, it's called comparative advantage.
The means of monetization wouldn't be destroyed, it just wouldnt protect some people from being copied, but creators could still sell their work, and people could still pay them if they think it's worth it (basically the movie market today, but more and legal). And big corporations are, most probably the more harmed in this process, whereas they possess, relatively, more patents and copyrights granted compared to small business or small creators, as well as resources to afford more lawyers and sue who disrespect their IP. Thus, they are the ones who benefit the most with copyrights and patents lawsuits.
"Small creators will get hit the worst because big corporations can just outright steal their work." Copying ≠ Stealing. Stealing involves subtracting. However, when I copy an information from you, you still have the same copy, the same exact content. So piracy it's not stealing.
"You don't have a right to access others people work without their permission. Destroying copyright would quite literally be trampling our natural rights."
Don't I? Based on what? Intelectual property is not legitimate property, and therefore it's not and can't be a natural right. As mentioned in the video (the first minutes), Intelectual property KILLS, and VIOLATES property rights. Kinsella elaborates on his book:
"As should be apparent, copyright and patent seek to prevent the owners of tangible property-scarce resources- from using their own property as they see fit. For example, they are prohibited, under patent law, from practicing patented methods, using their own property, or from shaping their own property into patented devices, even if they independently invent the method or device. Under copy-right law, third parties who have not contracted with the author are prevented from copying or profiting from the author’s original work. Clearly, sellers of novel devices or literary works can contract with buyers to prevent these buyers from reproducing, or even reselling, the item.
These contractual webs can be elaborate; a novel writer can license his story to a movie studio on the condition that the studio require all movie theaters to require customers to agree not to reproduce the plot of the movie, and so on. Yet, once third parties not bound by a contract acquire this information, they are free to use it as they see fit. The reserved-rights approach does not change this. Thus, it would probably be difficult to maintain anything similar to our present patent and copyright laws using contract alone." (Against intelectual property, p.55)
@@FilmmakerIQ Still on natural rights, IP can't be a natural right like the right to property is, because IP is not in fact property. It's not naturally scarce.
"[O]nly because scarcity exists is there even a problem of formulating moral laws; insofar as goods are superabun-dant (“free” goods), no conflict over the use of goods is possible and no action-coordination is needed. Hence, it follows that any ethic, correctly conceived, must be formulated as a theory of property, i.e., a theory of the as-signment of rights of exclusive control over scarce means. Because only then does it become possible to avoid otherwise inescapable and unresolvable conflict." (Hans Hoppe)
I am more for reducing the length to copy right and patents
Imagine having unlimited Maps for your favourite Game. Multibillion dollar companies don't care about your rights, I don't care for theirs.
Correct me if I'm misunderstanding. In Stephan Kinsella's example of Harry Potter, he seems to be arguing for what he sees as 'enough profit' for J.K. Rowling. I'm struggling to understand how someone who believes in personal liberty would feel comfortable telling someone else the value of the product they create. Would he feel comfortable having someone who is uninvolved with his life determine the value of his output - without his input? Is this a Libertarian value? If I'm misunderstanding, I'd appreciate clarification.
He is just giving an example of how someone could still profit off of creative works in a post-IP world. No value judgement necessarily, he is just using a number to show that someone can still make a relatively large profit with no monopoly.
I'm not saying it's enough profit. I'm countering arguments by the utilitarians when they say that without copyright you can't make a profit. I'm saying that it's up to every creator and entrepreneur to find ways to profit, but that often, they can, without IP. That's all.
@@calebader6695 You get it
@@nskinsella I can see both of your points. If someone's creation has value - the creator should be compensated. But I could see how an epidemic of copyrights and patents could clog up innovation. Is there a middle ground?
How would you feel about the creator keeping 100% for - say - 10 years - then after that their creation can be used by another producer for a licensing fee of 40% - that gets stepped-down to no less than 10% during the lifetime of the producer. At the end of the producer's life, 5% licensing fees go into trust for the family? I'm completely floating numbers - but I'm sure you get the point.
@@DrProgNerd "f someone's creation has value - the creator should be compensated" I do not agree with this at all. Nothing "has value." This is intrincism. No one "should be compensated." This is marxism. No one deserves an income, a payment, customers, whatever. You have to figure out a way to profit in a world of scarcity and competition.
". But I could see how an epidemic of copyrights and patents could clog up innovation."
It's not the abuse or epidemic. the system is not "broken." It's the thing itself. Any degree of IP distorts and harms. Just like a minimum wage--even a small minimum wage causes unemployment. "Is there a middle ground?" Between health and poison?
"How would you feel about the creator keeping 100% for - say - 10 years - then after that their creation can be used by another producer for a licensing fee of 40% - that gets stepped-down to no less than 10% during the lifetime of the producer. At the end of the producer's life, 5% licensing fees go into trust for the family? I'm completely floating numbers - but I'm sure you get the point." I get the point that you are trying to tweak a socialist system but nothing will fix it except abolition.
I think that the book Against intelectual monopoly is the best read on this matter.
Yeah it is a good one.
Absolutely. It’s the best economics book of the last century! Against Intellectual Property by Kinsella himself is the other essential read.
"I can't farm if you're going to farm."
There it is. The fundamental assumption that cooperation between strangers is impossible. Yes. You can both farm. This world is big enough for all of us.
A response to the fairness question:
Copyright law creates an expectation of being paid for writing a book, and that expectation makes people feel it is unfair not to be paid, and thus that the repeal of the law would be unfair. If you compare writing a book to solving an open mathematical problem, solving the math problem is much harder than writing a book. But there is no expectation of getting paid for solving a math problem because there is no law.
So the justification for the expectation of getting paid for a book isn't the amount of work, otherwise you'd have that same expectation for math and science. And you can pretty well see, example for example, that the only time there is a moral sense of duty for being paid only occurs when there is also a legal expectation. Examples: clothing designs, recipes, arguments in debates, business strategies: no expectation. Vs software, music, photography, there is an expectation. You could try to argue that copyright perfectly selects what is fair to protect, and doesn't protect the rest, it's a miracle.
But the reality is that, it is circular reasoning. The law creates an expectation, the expectation creates a sense of morality, the morality (fairness) is then used to justify the law. Get rid of the law, and your sense of fairness will update accordingly, just like you don't have an expectation of being paid (fairness) for things like math or debates.
Good point. Why are you giving it out for free?
Ideas are not made, they're discovered. Just like finding gold. Imagine if the first person to discover gold got granted a monopoly on it. You can't own an idea in another's head, nor is it practical to. Yes, if the first person to discover an idea gains a monopoly on it, then that does incentivize more discovery...but it monopolizes it lol. So that lowers innovation within the idea. For example; someone creates the phone. They gain a patent on the phone, now there's less innovation within the phone market & higher prices from constrained supply. With those higher prices it hurts people's purchasing power, so that can prevent/negate other innovations as well. Also, you have to take into account the arbitrariness of owning ideas. It's not like physical property with clear & defined boundaries. What is a 'phone'? It has a screen on it, so is a computer a phone? No, it's 'smaller', so is a tablet a phone? What does 'smaller' mean? A dial up phone is considered a phone, & it doesn't even have a screen & is definitely not small. Is anything that can 'call' another person a phone? NOBODY KNOWS!
And with this arbitrariness it leads to corruption. It leads to huge lawyer battles. It leads to public spending on enforcement & court cases. It wastes valuable court time that could've been spent on actual property rights.
For what?
Intellectual property isn't property. It's arbitrary government protectionism. If our goal is to encourage innovation, then why not just subsidize it? Seems much more practical & moral, not to mention easily adjustable.
@@austinbyrd4164 regular property is also arbitrary government protectionism
@da_Revo no it isn't. Physical property has clearly defined boundaries. Not that this addresses my numerous other points.
@@austinbyrd4164 having a clear boundary does not mean it is not being arbitrarily protected and the ownership enforced by the government
If people dislike copying other's work so much, they won't pay for unoriginal works, and the original artist will always have an ability to collect value for their originality. It's up to the author to sell their product in the way that is move valuable to them than a mere copy would be. You don't have a right to sell CDs under the constitution. You can perform live for money. You can't copy that. You can sell autographs. That's harder to copy. As for technological patents, there's no reason for them except to stifle competition and therefore innovation and improvement. If you want to gain a market edge with your idea, then you'll have to ensure your idea is executed better than the copy cats will implement it. If you can't, then you can hire someone who can. If you fail, then you fail. But you can't say you didn't have a chance to profit. 1st mover advantage is real. quality differences are real. implementation differences are real. every instance of the same idea produces a different product because of the human element, and all the different ways an idea can be transformed into a product.
Here's a thought. I write a book and take it to a publisher for them to help me sell my book in exchange for a percentage of the profits. I didn't catch the attention of the biggest company, but a modest one is getting the job done. I begin to sell the book for $10 a copy.
Amazon sees my book is selling, and they begin to sell it for $5.99 and free shipping, and $1.99 for a digital copy. With no copyright law, they don't have to tell anyone that this is ripped off. They can give me credit if they want to without ever having to share profit. Years of research and writing go down the toilet within 2 months and the larger company walks away with basically free money. No incentive for them to create, only to steal.
Let's take patent. I make a new widget that has obvious value. I ask around to see if someone will help me produce it. Again, Amazon sees the value in the widget and decides to produce and distribute it before I can even get off the ground. I have already invested into manufacturing, but have not sold anything yet. They sell my product at a lower price than I ever could due to their huge infrastructure and technological advantages. It would destroy every small business that creates.
@@2live4football Do you believe that as an individual or small business you will have any chance of suing amazon for patent infringement? By the time the lawsuit makes it to court you are bankrupt.
@@TribeWars1 if you have any kind of paper trail proving your case, then any good lawyer will take the case and wait for payment until settlement. They know that these are easy to win cases within current law and they will make far more money in the long run. If you take the protection of copyright out, then you have zero chance ever.
We live in the age of patreon and kickstarter, people support their favorite creators in multiple ways. If you're a good writer or musician, you can always make money as people will be motivated to support you through crowdfunding. People seem to forget, Shakespeare didn't need lawyers to sue anyone. He was contracted for his work and he liked what he did for a living. Romeo and Juliet was printed after he died, without payment to his estate. Bach was similarly paid a salary and bonuses by the church and I'd argue Bach is more prolific than any other musician of our age. Both their work is widely used to create derivative work and are adopted to different fields. They have contributed more to the collective benefit of humanity than any dumb apple patent claims about round cornered smartphones, as a result.
As soon as you remove copyrights and patents, significant resources will be spent trying to make innovations harder to copy. That is also a cost
I always find that nyms really know what they are talking about.
Ideas are not made, they're discovered. Just like finding gold. Imagine if the first person to discover gold got granted a monopoly on it. You can't own an idea in another's head, nor is it practical to. Yes, if the first person to discover an idea gains a monopoly on it, then that does incentivize more discovery...but it monopolizes it lol. So that lowers innovation within the idea. For example; someone creates the phone. They gain a patent on the phone, now there's less innovation within the phone market & higher prices from constrained supply. With those higher prices it hurts people's purchasing power, so that can prevent/negate other innovations as well. Also, you have to take into account the arbitrariness of owning ideas. It's not like physical property with clear & defined boundaries. What is a 'phone'? It has a screen on it, so is a computer a phone? No, it's 'smaller', so is a tablet a phone? What does 'smaller' mean? A dial up phone is considered a phone, & it doesn't even have a screen & is definitely not small. Is anything that can 'call' another person a phone? NOBODY KNOWS!
And with this arbitrariness it leads to corruption. It leads to huge lawyer battles. It leads to public spending on enforcement & court cases. It wastes valuable court time that could've been spent on actual property rights.
For what?
Intellectual property isn't property. It's arbitrary government protectionism. If our goal is to encourage innovation, then why not just subsidize it? Seems much more practical & moral, not to mention easily adjustable.
Even then, people already have the incentive to innovate to beat theor competition, can simply not spread the idea, & have nondisclosure agreements before distribution of knowledge.
Is that supposed to sound bad? That's good, actually. Incentivizes the search for authenticity and development of technology.
That cost already exists through government enforcement of ip.
This already happens in software and fails within hours
Intellectual property is not real property. The patent and copyright laws get in the way.
Intellectual property IS real property.
Property is a fictitious concept invented by man. We can define it as whatever we want.
@@marc4770 how is it real property if it necessitates the violation of physical property rights to enforce. By using the state to penalize me for copying and downloading an MP3 with my own computer you are violating MY property rights, not the other way around. That file is just a piece of binary code, you don't own it.
@@marc4770 No it is not
My take coming into this video, is that the system has to be sensible. The timelines long enough to enable innovation, but short enough to allow progress. The ethics I feel is what should set the line.
Curious to see what changes after the debate.
So one argues for moderation due to utility. The other argues for consistency and formal evidence of benefit.
As a limited government kind of guy, I think I'm for an average of 5 years of IP protection for commercial applications. The practical way I feel is a 10 year limit put into the constitution, and abolishing a ton of regulation so that IPs get used earlier and released to the world earlier as well.
@@acctsys 5 years!! That solves it! I never thought of that number before!! Thank you!!!!!
@@nskinsella Wow, the man himself! 😮
Ethically speaking, I think that if copyright and patents would exist, it should last the lifetime of the creator, but that would put an incentive to end the life of the creator.
I think the trend of innovation is just getting faster and faster, so that over time, the difference in impact of what is being debated becomes moot.
@@acctsys "I think that if copyright and patents would exist," But that's THE QUESTION. You can't just assume it. That's like saying "if chattel slavery exists, how many weeks vacation should slaves be given?"
@@acctsys Still, it wouldn't be very profitable for corporations to simply end that creator's life.
... And Terence McKenna said this is a great age for intelligence, because there is so little of it.
In Poland we have a saying: "na mądrej głowie włosy nie rosną" (on a wise head hair doesn't grow) and oh my, my, my, the bald guy is sure wise!
Keep copyright laws but reduce the length of them. 70 plus the lifetime of the author is too long. Patents of 20 years is ok but copyright is too long. They can reach over 120 years of protection.
We need to make variations of patents less patent-able. This is a trick corporations like drug companies always use. Perhaps make them shorter. Definitely need to somehow make it impossible for them to digitize everything as an asset and controllable for digital currency purposes. They are trying to do this right now while we are distracted.
The fact that artists have stronger property rights than inventors is disgusting and stupid.
So for how long should singing "Happy Birthday" to your children be illegal?
Ideas are not made, they're discovered. Just like finding gold. Imagine if the first person to discover gold got granted a monopoly on it. You can't own an idea in another's head, nor is it practical to. Yes, if the first person to discover an idea gains a monopoly on it, then that does incentivize more discovery...but it monopolizes it lol. So that lowers innovation within the idea. For example; someone creates the phone. They gain a patent on the phone, now there's less innovation within the phone market & higher prices from constrained supply. With those higher prices it hurts people's purchasing power, so that can prevent/negate other innovations as well. Also, you have to take into account the arbitrariness of owning ideas. It's not like physical property with clear & defined boundaries. What is a 'phone'? It has a screen on it, so is a computer a phone? No, it's 'smaller', so is a tablet a phone? What does 'smaller' mean? A dial up phone is considered a phone, & it doesn't even have a screen & is definitely not small. Is anything that can 'call' another person a phone? NOBODY KNOWS!
And with this arbitrariness it leads to corruption. It leads to huge lawyer battles. It leads to public spending on enforcement & court cases. It wastes valuable court time that could've been spent on actual property rights.
For what?
Intellectual property isn't property. It's arbitrary government protectionism. If our goal is to encourage innovation, then why not just subsidize it? Seems much more practical & moral, not to mention easily adjustable.
Reducing the length of them only negates their meaningless damage.
To the same degree a 70 year copyright law would be enforced with the weight of government behind prosecutorial charges in its own courts, the same degrees would occur with a 20 year patent. In fact, it's because of that enforcement that 20 eventually transitioned to 70, and given the track record of IP with technocrats, assuming 70 (or even 120) would be the hard limit is being too generous. The purpose of such a heavy and arbitrary restriction at all is to add on years, and thus give greater sense of weight to severities of penalty for ultimately causing a State offense for violating State court code.
Blockchain Technology might be a great way to meet in the middle as 3rd party services that build on blockchain can structure their own IP system by supporting original creators over copiers, for example by giving them an emblem of authenticity. People could still support whatever they'd like but most would be more inclined to support the original and because of how blockchain works, it is made much easier to verify who the original creator was without them even needing to make a patent. This would create a very natural market where original creators can still benefit from.
That, or the patenting process itself can be greatly streamlined using blockchain, same with licensing said patents, and what's to say that copyright can't also be modernized that way.
Any discussion about this needs to first realize that the term "Intellectual Property" is highly misleading, since copyright and patents are very different things and reasoning about one doesn't apply to the other.
I agree; these are two separate discussions and my opinion on both are pretty wildly different.
@@slushisimcambi2521 Mine too.
... and further. Patents on physical inventions which are also a completely different beast than patents on logic and math and stuff where the product it self also under copyright.
It is not in any way proved that just because patents seem to work in one area, then they'll also work in another - or that extending the patentable domain is wise.
I don't see the practical differences as relevant in this debate.
Absolutely. But looking at their origins, it was clear they were both made to expire after a reasonable length of time. Now, if you have a phalanx of attorneys and the wealth to pay off politicians, they can be made to last several lifetimes. That is the common issue and mechanism by which the laws staunch so much creativity and innovation. Invention relies on previous innovation. Imagine if someone were to invent the sealed bearing or wrote Shakespeare's plays given today's eternal, government-backed patent enforcement. One family dynasty would essentially be gatekeepers of the industrialized world and nobody would know who Shakespeare was (it took two centuries of freely publishing and presenting his work before it finally caught on).
@@wolflarson71 Of course the practical differences are relevant the their utility and thus for whether they should be abolished. At least for patents, a large portion of their justification is that they have utility (a claim without much actual evidence)
Well when the USA got its independence it got rid of payments for UK IP…
Great point.
Including the Steam engine I remember
With regular property like housing or cars, by using it without owner's pemission, you are going to change his property of deny its use at the time. With "intellectual property" owner is none the wiser to who is using his property and why, and only uses his monopoly power on knowledge to supress competition. That's why natural property rights are necessary.
I create software. I sell it through a broker. I see the exact second that my software goes up on wares sits because my sales take a nose dive. I may not know specifically who is downloading my software, but it has a tangible effect upon the return of my time investment. I am not concerned about competition because I strive for originality, although if other people iterate too closely upon my work, that again steals the fruit of my labour. Why should indivuals or coorporations, especially the Chinese, be able to steal from me like that?
@@Martial-Mat I am also a software developer, but I'm an employee and never sold my own software. Is it possible that switching to a software-as-a-service model would both protect your sales and remove the need for IP laws? (Until someone hacks into your server and duplicates the software - which feels even more like theft :) )
@@Martial-Mat if you set up a lemonade stand in your street, and then I set one up next to you, you'll see your sales drop, am I stealing the fruits of your labour?
Copyright is nothing but a prettier version of a guild system
@@noahorr3480 Sotware as a service is the scourge of the industry from a consumer perspective - the concept that customers should have to continue paying you indefinitely for a single creation. I see that as being as immoral as stealing software.
@@komnennos If I invent lemonade, then you steal my creation in order to compete with me, then I'd say that you have behaved immorally and unfairly, especially as it tends to be the companies with the most resources that get to own all the lemonade stands.
I don't know what you mean by a "guild system."
Came here to understand these ideas, because AI is about to destroy the concept of Intellectual Property
And I couldn't be happier!
Copyright can be fixed.
There's a new trend where creators now use their copyright to target social platforms instead of regular people.
If social media permits engagements on their work then they have violated copyright, until then they have not.
Let's see how these tech tycoons like it. 😂
Funny how a public choice dream always turns into a public choice nightmare.
"You would never get these devices without these patents" - so we would have iphones with sharp corners?
Abolishing copyrights and patents is a good idea.
No its a terrible idea.
Fraud is already illegle and theft is already illegel
False question to ask, it does not matter whether or not it gives more innovation or not, the simple fact is that IP infringes on the rights of everyone who owns property to do whatever they please with it meaning it violates everyone's rights. IP must be abolished this instant. IP is not property, it is made up and does not exist in a state of nature where government does not exist.
They are not a bad idea. We just need to roll it back to a modest level. It has gotten completely out if hand in its current state. Especially when you roll it it with trademark law.
That’s not true to my knowledge. The 2008 economics book ‘Against Intellectual Monopoly’ & the 2001 essay ‘Against Intellectual Property’ are the two most important texts of the last century! Each has nearly flawless argumentation. All intellectuals & people interested in art, tech or economics need to read both (free online). If you can’t read them now, then write down both titles so you can tell others so they can read them.
I respect Epstein as a man of intellect, of logic and wit, with an amazing capacity to remember and coherently explain his arguments, as a non-leftist, but the Intellectual Property debate is settled, IP is an absurd concept. No way around it.
Copyright can be fixed.
There's a new trend where creators now use their copyright to target social platforms instead of regular people.
If social media permits engagements on their work then they have violated copyright, until then they have not.
Let's see how these tech tycoons like it. 😂
Creative entrepreneurs sell actually experiences which cannot be fully copied. When they sell a good, the good actually comes with intangibles and services. You go to a drugstore and buy a drug, it is a complete experience of pre-purchase, during purchase, and after purchase. Since experiences are subjective so that every person values them differently, even if you copy the tangibles, the totality of tangibles and intangibles are different to different individuals. Hence the argument of unable to recoup the cost of investment because competitors can simply copy is fallacious.
Doesn't this favor Epstein's position of retaining a limited form of IP controls? If intangibles matter, then the copier not only doesn't have to pay the tangible fixed costs of innovation or novel creation, but also whatever costs go into the intangible experience as well.
Maybe we should not have a competitive market we should be team working to make a better world. Patents blocks improving designs can kill if there's patents on cures.
What has happened is that due to over-reliance on these monopoly protection laws, US has dropped the ball on efficient management systems that also leads to lower lead time for development or design of a new product., along with a more efficient manufacture and deployment of the same product. So US manufacturing firms are always playing catch up to their foreign counterparts.
What would happen to drug companies if they lost US patent protections? They will act less like Ford and more like Japanese car manufacturers like Toyota.
the copyright debate is ultimately a debate around what the creation of IP is based on and how long we should have copyright:
External Factors (20/effective-infinity years of copyright protecting their work so they "feel" safe to create, like a lab experiment animal)
Vs. Internal Factors
(the creative and industrial self-determination where regardless of money, fame, fortune or power they create for it's own sake and pleasure)
I personally think the latter approach is a better one and like one of them said, "piracy" [aggressive archival] is rampant [and more importantly free-advertising of a product or service]; yet people still create even if they think some of their content gets "stolen"(copied). also if copyright protections are why we create... why do we have Plato, Musashi Miyamoto, Einstein, Nikola Tesla, Sir Isaac Newton, Rene Descartes, Shakespeare, and many others as well as their creative works? before copyright? oh right, because copyright's foundation is censorship and not property rights of the author.
Hope you have a great day & Safe Travels!
Copyright can be fixed.
There's a new trend where creators now use their copyright to target social platforms instead of regular people.
If social media permits engagements on their work then they have violated copyright, until then they have not.
Let's see how these tech tycoons like it. 😂
And if you can't have such IP protections, I could open my own businesses named Microsoft, Apple, Google, IBM, Amazon, etc. Why give a "monopoly" on a name since I can't protect my personal name that way?
That is fraud, but you are defrauding the customers, and thus should have to pay them restitution. Trademark law has you paying the companies who name you are using, but you have not defrauded them.
That's a trademark issue not a patent or copyright issue. And by the way trademark law is unjust too, but for different reasons. If you call yourself microsoft you'll soon be sued or go out of business because of all the customers you fool. So it's a dumb argument.
Entrepreneurs can protect their own brands themselves without the state.
Really? With what? Guns?
How many guns can entrepreneurs and small businesses bring against companies like Google? The same company who openly stole the work of Sun, driving them into the ground - Do you think their theft would be any less brazen if IP laws did not exist?
Ideas are not made, they're discovered. Just like finding gold. You can't own an idea in another's head, nor is it practical to. Yes, if the first person to discover an idea gains a monopoly on it, then that does incentivize more discovery...but it monopolizes it lol. So that lowers innovation within the idea. For example; someone creates the phone. They gain a patent on the phone, now there's less innovation within the phone market & higher prices from constrained supply. With those higher prices it hurts people's purchasing power, so that can prevent/negate other innovations as well. Also, you have to take into account the arbitrariness of owning ideas. It's not like physical property with clear & defined boundaries. What is a 'phone'? It has a screen on it, so is a computer a phone? No, it's 'smaller', so is a tablet a phone? What does 'smaller' mean? A dial up phone is considered a phone, & it doesn't even have a screen & is definitely not small. Is anything that can 'call' another person a phone? NOBODY KNOWS!
And with this arbitrariness it leads to corruption. It leads to huge lawyer battles. It leads to public spending on enforcement & court cases. It wastes valuable court time that could've been spent on actual property rights.
For what?
Intellectual property isn't property. It's arbitrary government protectionism. If our goal is to encourage innovation, then why not just subsidize it? Seems much more practical & moral, not to mention easily adjustable.
Ideas are frequently the result of years of effort and cost, focussed upon solving specific problems or limitations, and creators deserve fair recompense for doing so. The fact that they may lack the financial means to manufacture their solution on a grand scale should not be used as justification for stealing that work from them.
You seem to have the fanciful notion that inventions simply pop into people's heads as they walk down the street, which is extremely rarely the case when it comes to society-changing inventions.
As for patents, they are extremely specific. You don't just say "a device for talking to people at a distance" and that covers every conceivable permuation of a phone.
Intellectual property has a tangible cost and a tangible value. Getting hung up on the words "property" is like fixating on the word "new" in the phrase "green new deal." It's entirely the wrong thing to focus on.
The public already subsidises innovation at NASA, medical companies, and weapon manufacturers - the latter I disagree with. Where should the line be in terms of subsidising every crackpot idea? If and idea is NOT granted subsidy, does that mean it should not receive protection? Just looking at the epic fails on Dragon's Den, we know for certain that assessment panels get it massively wrong sometimes.
@Mat Broomfield Obviously discovery of ideas can take time & effort. Never said otherwise. They already get rewarded for it by satisfying market demands with said innovation, they can simply not tell their secrets if they so please, & they can make people sign nondisclosure agreements before distribution of knowledge to slow the spread of info. They have plenty of incentive to innovate already.
Copying is the nature of innovation. You don't own an (arbitrary) idea in another's head. Not to mention many people can mutually discover ideas. You cannot clearly define the phone. An iphone & a wall mounted dial-up have almost nothing to do with eachother. They're practically different products. The distinction is entirely arbitrary. If there was a patent on 'phones', then that drastically lowers innovation/supply within the 'phone' market, *no matter how you define it.* A computer, walkie-talkie, & moores code are considered a phone under your definition btw. Bit too broad lol.
Let me elaborate on my gold analogy; The first person to discover a new metal owns all of said metal (in my hypothetical universe). _This is cool! It rewards those people for discovering!_ Somebody then comes along and is the 'first' person to discover gold. They now own all gold. They restrict the supply of gold heavily, increasing it's price. Innovations within the gold market are now haulted. Jewelry doesn't start to exist. Tools & stuff using gold aren't created. Since the price is higher, people's purchasing power is hurt (especially relative to no complete ownership). This hurts other possible innovations throughout the economy. In the mean time, courts, police, lawyers, & all of their precious time & resources from the public are distributed to the enforcement of maintaining this monopoly.
Overall, this is worse for everyone. People already have an incentive to discover.
Everything you're saying about subsidization could be said about intellectual property. _It could be given to stupid ideas. How do you know how much is too much? Those ideas are arbitrary._
If the government has the resources to identify & maintain a monopoly on arbitrary ideas who then take huge sums from the public, then they have the resources to identify & fund those ideas.
I'm simply offering subsidization as a *substitute* to ip. It serves the same purpose. Encouraging innovation, but at least with subsidization it's direct & adjustable. We can give the people who've built false wealth through IP time to leave that market & slowly diminish the subsidization over time. And all without the monopolistic features of IP.
@@Martial-Mat "Ideas are frequently the result of years of effort and cost, focused upon solving specific problems or limitations"
No, the years of effort is the ideas/formulas/etc. that people can come up with but that don't actually work, not that the ideas themselves take years of effort or cost.
"You seem to have the fanciful notion that inventions simply pop into people's heads as they walk down the street,"
Yes, because that actually does happen quite frequently. Ideas are typically combinations of previously existing ideas, and they do sometimes occur in more than one persons head at the same time even, which is one of the reasons there are different views within patent rights about who should own the patent based on timing of submission or invention/etc.
"which is extremely rarely the case when it comes to society-changing inventions. "
You need to offer some kind of proof or stats, assertion is insufficient. The burden is on you since you are agreeing with a monopoly privilege grant. Further, I think many people can think of many "inventions" that are huge where this is obviously the case, like the wheel, or fishing nets, or the light bulb (which has gone through and will continue to go through iterations and improvements around a basic design)
"is like fixating on the word "new" "
This is both a good and bad analogy, because "green new deal" was a phrase used to manipulate people into thinking of "good" previous legislation, just like "intellectual property" is used to manipulate people into thinking of copyright like property.
The "bad" part is that I don't think that was the intent of your development of this analogy and your original point didn't really make much sense from the opposing perspective, to circle back on that...
"has a tangible cost and a tangible value"
Art no one wants that therefore does not sell still has a tangible cost, but "no value" .. except that this isn't quite right. That art may be ahead of its time and immensely valuable later on, or it may be really valuable to the kids mom who drew the picture but worthless to others. Value is subjective. Cost and value aren't really related in any way except in the mind of the person who paid the cost or those aware of the cost paid who care.
I use the phrase "contribute to what you value" as it concerns "intellectual property" because I believe that is what people ought to do. But it removes this unnecessary connection to cost which should absolutely be a consideration by the person who spent the time making the idea, how can they recoup on their investment, but is not something their customers should need to consider.
"The fact that they may lack the financial means to manufacture"
It's not just that. They may also not have a fully fledged idea to begin with. Maybe the idea only works if it has the right marketing, the right "killer app" or the right environment that understands it. It is far more complicated than just them not having the financial resources. And these other issues add up to success that has nothing to do with their idea in itself. Success with ideas is like that.
@@Martial-Mat You are arguing that people should get patents because of the effort they put in. By that logic, whoever is most awful at solving a problem should get the monopoly, because that person has to do the most work.
@@CarrotCakeMake What a ridiculous argument. Most inventions don't occur by luck or simply because a genius comes up with it. It needs to be iterated, problem solved, evolved, and developed until it reaches a useable state. Do you think NASA is awful at problem solving simply because it took them years to get to the moon? No, many challenges simply do not yield to quick, inspired, easy solutions. That does not mean that the inventors do not merit protection.
'Sure the current system isn't perfect' is such a lazy strawman.
'Sure torture isn't a perfect solution but'
'Sure trans-Atlantic slavery isn't perfect but'
As if anybody was demanding perfection of a great-but-not-perfect system. No, the critique is of severe dysfunction or even deep immorality. I keep hearing that line and it's sleazy.
Copyright can be fixed.
There's a new trend where creators now use their copyright to target social platforms instead of regular people.
If social media permits engagements on their work then they have violated copyright, until then they have not.
Let's see how these tech tycoons like it. 😂
i came upon the topic of copyright abolition in the Pirate Cinema book, which pretty much states that all these movies and other copyright media is the culture of everyone and should be open to use of everyone (the main character was practically a guy who made memes, of a sort, and who ended up getting targeted by the filthy rich media corporations who tried to drown him in fines)
the book made a good argument, someone else should give it a read
If it has an audible version, I’ll be jumping on that opportunity. Always good to have a list ready for car rides.
God bless you for saying aarons name
Hmm. This gave me lots more to think about. No easy answers in real life are there? Patent trolls are are a real drag on society though. Maybe patents need to have some time limit to deliver and not just on paper. One fallacy though, big companies easily overwhelm small patent owners simply because they can afford a lot more lawyers than the little guy. Works in theory, not in practice.
That is true. Even with false DMCA.
It the practice is different than the theory? The theory is wrong.
I didn’t realize Richard Epstein is 79! He looks and sounds great
Empirically we can see that "public domain" does not forbid commercialization and competition. See open source software. Massive amount of corporate buy in. Massive competition. While IP is certainly used as a club by some in the space it is not the primary reason people don't copy software. There are plenty of other ways to manage the "bad" parts of not having IP.
the response to land ownership I would offer around 21:30 is a land tax, based solely on acreage. It’s a subscription with your local authorities for certain property-based protections that have a real and tangible cost, that incentivizes maximum efficiency with the use of space.
If I write a book and there are no copyright laws, people can just copy it and sell it for free. There would be no point whatsoever in writing a book except possibly donations. Most full time writers couldn't exist. Any solutions?
Ideas are not made, they're discovered. Just like finding gold. Imagine if the first person to discover gold got granted a monopoly on it. You can't own an idea in another's head, nor is it practical to. Yes, if the first person to discover an idea gains a monopoly on it, then that does incentivize more discovery...but it monopolizes it lol. So that lowers innovation within the idea. For example; someone creates the phone. They gain a patent on the phone, now there's less innovation within the phone market & higher prices from constrained supply. With those higher prices it hurts people's purchasing power, so that can prevent/negate other innovations as well. Also, you have to take into account the arbitrariness of owning ideas. It's not like physical property with clear & defined boundaries. What is a 'phone'? It has a screen on it, so is a computer a phone? No, it's 'smaller', so is a tablet a phone? What does 'smaller' mean? A dial up phone is considered a phone, & it doesn't even have a screen & is definitely not small. Is anything that can 'call' another person a phone? NOBODY KNOWS!
And with this arbitrariness it leads to corruption. It leads to huge lawyer battles. It leads to public spending on enforcement & court cases. It wastes valuable court time that could've been spent on actual property rights.
For what?
Intellectual property isn't property. It's arbitrary government protectionism. If our goal is to encourage innovation, then why not just subsidize it? Seems much more practical & moral, not to mention easily adjustable.
Even then, people already have the incentive to innovate to beat theor competition, can simply not spread the idea, & have nondisclosure agreements before distribution of knowledge.
@@austinbyrd4164 "Any solutions", he asked, not "Please spam the same GD wall of text all over this comment section."
@RicardoAGuitar Demand contractual benefits for your ideas before distribution of your ideas. Temporarily subsidize innovation as a substitute for ip to give people time to leave the ip market. This has the same effect as ip without arbitrary government granted monopolies leading to the problems mentioned in my "wall of text"
Most full-time writers ceasing to exist would be a benefit, not a problem to be solved. Most authors are bad. Most books are bad. Most authors don't make any profit in the current system, and often lose money self-publishing, but keep at the job whether or not they can do it well. Some keep at it because they are deluded into thinking they deserve to be paid well and eventually will be, but more of them care far more about public recognition of their ideas than about remuneration.
@@magister343 There are a lot of terrible authors, but would there be any full time authors without copyright laws?
Similarly, should we end restrictions on insider trading?
Insider trading should be a matter of contract between stock holders and stock buyers.
@@CarrotCakeMake yes
The government certainly shouldn't regulate it. It's up to stock exchanges to implement whatever trading rules they want on their platform.
@@phamnuwen9442 Martha Steward did prison time for it with no prior criminal record. But it advanced the career of James Comey. James would later turn the 5th floor of the FBI into a political action committee.
@@tnekkc Ok.
one of the few topics i never have been able to make up my mind.... the question that stephan brought up, 130 years or no 0 years... that is the issue i have. Where is the line to be drawn. If you support a line then its just blah
This is a frontier in political economic theory, I feel. As regards to Ethics, maybe the answer should be the lifetime of the creator. The only problem with tying it to life is there becomes an incentive to take that life away.
I get the same "this is on the edge" feeling on estate taxes, because the incentive is no longer relevant, and the justification can shift from utilitarian to a more prescriptive morality one.
Modern IP is insane. It stifles innovation and limits freedom. Make it 5 years at most.
not at all....
True, one can simply monopolize a market because their brand of technology can be made only one way.
@@supergamergrill7734 so look at the end product or service. And develop your own methods. Not hard.
@@MrSquigglies I agree, exploit a loophole if there's any. IP also stimulates competition and innovation
It can also prevent IP theft
Regardless of any Utilitarian reasons, the simple idea of intellectual "property" is hilarious. Property involves mixing your labor with elements of nature to make something useful that you now own (or from purchasing something from someone who did so). Ownership means you have exclusive rights to use or dispose of the property as you see fit, as long as doing so doesn't initiate force against another.
This is not, in any way, true of an idea. You cannot dispose of an idea that is in someone else's mind. But more importantly, ideas are infinitely reproducible.
An example: If I were to take my neighbor's car, my neighbor would have one less car and I'd have one more car (and no bill of sale). Whereas, if I were to see my neighbor's car, and make another one, I would have a good copy of his car, but he'd still have his. I would have mixed my labor with elements of nature to make something useful. I did my neighbor no harm here.
Intellectual "property" would be a claim of my neighbor that I "stole" his car even while he still possesses it. Any investigator would laugh in his face! I can't steal something he still possesses!
Therefore, any attempt to stop "theft" of intellectual "property" is initiating force against someone. It's actual theft!
Would this mean that land held by someone, but not put to use, would not constitute property? Or would only those parts in active use -- maybe with some reasonable setback from the used part, e.g. a "yard" around a house -- be personal property? Legit questions about your position, not arguments as posed.
@@bloodgain He’s assuming land is personal property, it has an actual physical correlate of an amount of square footage area. What is monopolized in copyrights and patents is the “work” or invention. There is no physical correlate to work or invention, it is an abstract idea. It is impossible to have property in a work or invention as it is just abstract. What IP laws do is it grants people/entities monopolies in the application of the abstract work or invention in EVERYONE ELSE’s property, but also in all matter in general. IP is monopoly over everyone else’s uses of their own property and matter in general. Hope this helps.
Patents only prevent sale of copied products. If you create a replica of an iPhone you'd be allowed to use it or donate it, but you can't brand it and make a profit from it.
@@akashrajkishore No. Use of invention is monopolized too when it is patented. The exception is the exhaustion doctrine. I encourage you to research this
@@akashrajkishore As I said, theft. They stand between 2 willing parties making a profitable transaction (for both). If one owns a thing, then they can dispose or sell the thing as they see fit (that's what ownership means).
There is no theft in copying. There is theft in preventing it.
What are the causal factors for this discussion which makes it so seemingly imperative?
The absolutely horrible effects of IP law on the entirety of humanity, especially the poor and less powerful
@@user-wl2xl5hm7k If you don't know or aren't made aware of something which belongs to you (or is created by you) and which is actively being taken from you, how does it hurt you?
@@merlepatterson you can't steal ideas, you can only copy them as ideas are infinitely abundant, copying is NOT theft
@@nimbletimplekins7601 Actually, copying without attribution is illegal and is written into copyright law. Though, it is true that it happens daily across the globe, unabated. I guess it could mean there will be no more Edisons, Newtons or Einsteins, but those who are "First to copyright" going forward and attribution will take a back seat to opportunists?
@@merlepatterson Edison copied Nikola Tesla's works, what a TERRIBLE example to use. Copying is a necessary part of life and without it we wouldn't have half the inventions we have today. Hell even computers wouldn't be so advanced as they are now if Bill Gates didn't """steal""" IBM's DOS and vastly improve upon it to make windows
If there were no benefit to the creators, why do creators seek patents and copyrights? Why not just publish it all in the public domain? Because they know they'd be ripped off.
Exactly. I own a business that creates software for law firms to automate their processes. One project I am currently working on has taken me over a year. If someone can just come along and copy/paste all my code and claim it as their own, then I would never do it in the first place.
@@LegalAutomation You almost certainly have contracts with those firms for this software. You would just need to have a resume showing what you've done in the past and testimonials and then from that you would ask for payment in installments as you develop.
It is not a requirement for you to have copyright for your livelihood. And you aren't the only software developer here.
Kinsella isn't claiming there is no benefit to creators. His claim is that it's not beneficial on the whole to creativity in general, meaning that by giving benefit to creator 1 now, you are holding up creator 2 from being able to build off creator 1s work.
To give another example issue, we have a lot of sequels or remakes these days even when those do not make sense or improve upon the original. One reason for this is that companies need to make these to maintain rights and they'd rather do that than experiment with something new. But if anyone could do this, it would drastically lower the value as people would more quickly tire of this behavior, with exception to the small niche that would want to see 80 different versions of the same story.
@@Korodarn Funnily enough, woke corporate PR and executive committees love the fact that IP exists for reasons of stifling creativity, and lording the stagnation of the free expression of ideas above the wider population. If a lot of people who detested the current trend in PR campaigns saw the connection between franchises they resonate with to IP law, then a lot of energy and effort maybe wouldn’t be as readily wasted in reacting to recycled gaslighting tactics.
@@LegalAutomation As if a law firm would just download some bootleg version of your software from third-party website. Customers like that are usually interested in working with a trusted party and getting support contracts with continuous update streams.
Stephan makes some good arguments. I think the best argument he makes here is that "intellectual property" isn't true property, even by Richard's own definitions. Only a few extreme outliers support truly protecting it like other types of private property, which is a big hint that it's not the same.
However, I don't think this is enough to declare that it deserves _no_ protections at all. I'm not entirely sold (yet?) that some protections _with_ quid pro quo, like disclosure and entering the public domain permanently, doesn't help to enlarge the public domain over time. Nor do I (yet?) agree that creative works that are more than simple ideas or truths don't deserve at least some limited protection.
I do agree that our current system is horribly broken and corrupted, and that is difficult to resolve as a libertarian with the idea that it should be allowed at all. In most cases, we tend to look at these systems and say if it can be corrupted to this level, it shouldn't be done. However, I'm more of a pragmatist, so I think a broken system can sometimes be replaced with a much less corruptible* one. In some cases, we have no choice politically but to propose an alternative, e.g. UBI vs our current social entitlement programs. In other cases, we have no (non-violent) choice at all; if the current healthcare system has major problems, we can't just do away with it entirely.
(* I'd say incorruptible, but nothing is incorruptible, with or without government intervention. The government is just better at that -- corruption, killing people, and not much else.)
That said, Stephan is by far the better debater here. Richard is smart and good at writing or giving prepared talks on this, but in terms of pure debate, Stephan won. Richard hardly addressed Stephan's points unless he had prepared material for one. Stephan at least gave me some new ideas on the topic, though Richard's encyclopedic knowledge and reform efforts are impressive. Considering Stephan was supporting the underdog (by far) side of the topic, that's a technical win in my book. I think too many people voted "undecided" up front here, when they really weren't. They might have believed the current system is bad, but they came in believing IP deserved at least some patent and copyright protections.
It's a hard sell stance on a topic, considering what exists now under the monopoly of government is so adversarial to any alternatives that would be solely contractually and market based. NDA's are a better means of keeping to privacy, and establishing an order of business that many people would want. Compared to the involuntary means and methods of the State, they're voluntary in nature as contracts formed in the market.
Maybe it's a little similar in situation to center-leftists hearing about the problems of socialized healthcare related to the price calculation dilemma, but their conditioning through sheer time towards a knee-jerk distrust of market forces makes viewing spontaneously emerging alternatives a very slow and laboring process. It's not a one to one comparison really, but as far as mental exercise goes, it's something.
@@Hibernial Yeah, the heavy government intervention in the market has really skewed the layman's concept of market forces. I frequently have to point out that in a true _laissez-faire_ market, there are no corporations as we understand them, so you can't think of things in terms of what "Big Corporate" would do in such a market. That usually helps open up the discussion, at least. And I'm not even in support of true _laissez-faire,_ just something much closer to it.
To be fair, even I have a hard time wrangling all the details of the healthcare issue. I sometimes wonder if there's any path to an improved market that removes the worst of the completely rent-seeking insurance industry and allows for anything resembling a free market. More importantly, if we _can't_ find a way to fix our system -- and soon -- socialized healthcare is inevitable. That will become a losing battle, and the fools in the Republican Party will be the ones losing it on our behalf, like it or not -- unless something huge happens with the Libertarian Party's traction even sooner. So we had best also think about what the best -- or least bad -- version of single payer would look like, so at least we're prepared to suggest a good compromise. Otherwise, the Dems will write the system they want, and we definitely won't like it. Ideological purity can be our worst enemy.
Arguably, a major problem with US drug prices is foreign governments failing to recognize US patents in effect by “regulating” drug prices. Thus, the US market has to absorb all the development costs, as the US government fails to take action against foreign infringers.
People make money by creating value.
They don't need a monopoly from government to do so.
Your failure to understand economics doesn't justify attacking people.
The US government already murders plenty of people.
Destroying good health care in the US is worse enough.
No need to make the rest of the world worse as well.
@@voswouter87 so letting the EU free ride is a good thing? Why should the US subsidize nearly equally prosperous countries?
@@tomhalla426 _"Why should the US subsidize..."_
It shouldn't.
@@tomhalla426 It's governments that create these insane costs with their regulations. The solution to government created problems is never more power for that government.
@@voswouter87 if you did know the history of drug regulation in the US, you might have a different opinion. While there has been overreach, Thalidomide is a fair reason for the current system.
Lawyers thrive in the meantime.
I am simply not for being completely cut out of my own ideas and production. I dont give a shit about helping the world. If I cant benefit from my innovation, why do it.
People like you are one of the reasons which I.P. should be abolished asap.
Your comment could be used to justify any other form of monopoly, and I don't think you would be capable of accepting this inevitable consequence, because in a situation of only monopolies operating, you would be harmed as well as everyone.
@@TheLucasbr152 ...spoken like a socialist. Mine is mine, yours is yours. If mine makes a monopoly, so be it. Patents run out. Copyrights are ALWAYS for sale. You want mine, buy it.
@@thebestblainejohnson Me, a socialist? You are the one here claiming for a personal monopoly, just like a socialist would. Copyrights shouldn't be sold, because there's not a valid reason to it's existence, you don't have a right to stablish a monopoly on your idea.
"[O]nly because scarcity exists is there even a problem of formulating moral laws; insofar as goods are superabundant (“free” goods), no conflict over the use of goods is possible and no action-coordination is needed. Hence, it follows that any ethic, correctly conceived, must be formulated as a theory of property, i.e., a theory of the assignment of rights of exclusive control over scarce means. Because only then does it become possible to avoid otherwise inescapable and unresolvable conflict." - Hoppe
"It is a peculiarity of property rights in patents (and copy-rights) that they do not arise out of the scarcity of the ob-jects which become appropriated. They are not a conse-quence of scarcity. They are the deliberate creation of statute law, and, whereas in general the institution of pri-vate property makes for the preservation of scarce goods, tending . . . to lead us “to make the most of them,” property rights in patents and copyrights make possible the creation of a scarcity of the products appropriated which could not otherwise be maintained." - Arnold Plant
"Bouckaert also argues that natural scarcity is what gives rise to the need for property rules, and that IP laws create an artificial, unjustifiable scarcity. As he notes:
Natural scarcity is that which follows from the relation-ship between man and nature. Scarcity is natural when it is possible to conceive of it before any human, institutional, contractual arrangement. Artificial scarcity, on the other hand, is the outcome of such arrangements.
Artificial scarcity can hardly serve as a justification for the legal framework that causes that scarcity. Such an argument would be completely circular. On the contrary, artificial scarcity itself needs a justification.Thus, Bouckaert maintains that “only naturally scarce enti-ties over which physical control is possible are candidates for” protection by real property rights.66For ideal objects, the only protection possible is that achievable through per-sonal rights, i.e., contract (more on this below).
Only tangible, scarce resources are the possible object of interpersonal conflict, so it is only for them that prop-erty rules are applicable. Thus, patents and copyrights are unjustifiable monopolies granted by government legisla-tion. It is not surprising that, as Palmer notes, “[m]onopoly privilege and censorship lie at the historical root of patent and copyright.” It is this monopoly privilege that creates an artificial scarcity where there was none before. Patent and copyright are good against all third parties, regardless of their consent to a contract. They are real rights that bind everyone, in the same way that my title to a parcel of land binds everyone to respect my prop-erty-even if they do not have a contract with me. A con-tract, by contrast, binds only parties to the contract. It is like private law between the parties.82It does not bind third parties, i.e., those not in “privity” with the original parties.83 Thus, if the book purchaser B relates to third parties T the plot of the purchased novel, these third parties T are not bound, in general, by the original contractual obliga-tion between A and B. If I learn how to adjust my car’s car-buretor to double its efficiency, or if I learn of a poem or movie plot someone else has written, why should I have to pretend that I am ignorant of these things, and refrain from acting on this knowledge? I have not obligated myself by contract to the creator. I do not deny that contractual obligations can be implicit or tacit, but there is not even an implicit contract in such situations." - S. Kinsella (Against Intelectual property)
Read his book.
I agree with you. No one has the right to force you to help others. You are a sovereign individual. Although, I do think the current patent system when combined with the legal system, favors big business by a large margin. I would support lowering patent life a bit, but with the same bill I would massively cut regulation. The net result would probably be the same level of innovation, but with small businesses and individuals having much greater successes versus big business/big gov. The main issue is that the current legal system favors whoever has the most capital to dump into their IP case.
@@TheLucasbr152 Patents and copyrights do arise out of scarcity. They take mans labor to conceive and create. We are all mortal beings. A mortal beings labor is a scarce commodity as it is constrained by his lifetime. A humans mind only belongs to themselves. They have the absolute right to never share their invention even if it would benefit many. However as soon as they participate in the market, by selling a device made from their patent, the countdown should start. The market that they participate in is built by people forfeit their own IP in order to have a successful society. I believe the eventual forfeiture of IP is a social contract that everyone signs when they elect to stay a citizen.
Meanwhile in China:
Hippity hoppity your designs are my property
Yeah and China has a hyper competitive market that is surpassing the US because of it. Who do you think makes your phone hmm?
@@nimbletimplekins7601 Slave labor.
@@sanniepstein4835 more chinese people own their homes than Americans
open source is the future.
to not have adam mossoff do this debate is a crime
Richard is so incredibly naive. He thinks that he can create a system that optimizes things and doesn't understand the political incentives will ensure it is corrupted. I do like that this was a good cordial discussion, despite the fact they have vastly different views.
Political incentives corrupt the current system too. Just saying something can be corrupted in itself doesn’t really persuade.
@@sburn1919 I'm not arguing for the current system, I agree with Kinsella, it should be abolished. Will it cause issues? Yes. But I trust that people can work around any issues because the state of no copyright and patent is the natural state and I trust free people to find solutions without state coercion.
None of that is to say things would be perfect or there wouldn't be potential to lose some kinds of projects or innovations. But I care about freedom more than some ill conceived attempt to try to maximize efficiency by regulating society as it depends on the intelligence of a very small number of people who think they understand things they probably don't.
And I expect to persuade nobody who thinks like that. It is against their temperament and hostile to their delusions of grandeur about how they can improve society with their designs.
it has been some time I thought about this but the system of copyright should be tied to profit-based length.
so you can make some profit from making a new product but after you recoup your investment + some profit the product is no longer protected by copyright
this should be different from type to type.
Seems arbitrary an not based on any principle.
This cannot be justified using any principled arguments. However, even when ignoring that as on objection, it obviously is impossible to actually make your suggestion work in practice. You would need incredible amounts of bureaucracy to keep track of these metrics for every single copyrighted item. This system opens up many many more avenues for corruption than even the current system. Copyright holders would simply find ways to make their "investment costs" look bigger on paper than they are and ways to make their profits look smaller than they actually are.
The problem with patents is mainly in their execution, not the concept. Patents are a wonderful idea, and we definitely SHOULD have patents. That is NOT to say, however, that there aren't TONS of abuses with patents. There are. And those should be addressed. But the idea of getting rid of patents completely is absurd. Who's going to write a book if someone else can simply reprint it and sell it to all your customers? Who's going to be a working musician, coder, writer, artist, inventor, etc.? If a right click, copy, paste, is all it takes to cut you out of your own work, who would ever pay you to do it?
The first man said something like "companies will just rest on their laurels after releasing a product" uh yeah, but they invented that product to begin with! The amount of money spent on R&D will be cut by 99% and everyone will just create "steal everyone else's product" departments. Things will be reworked to simply copy and produce as fast as possible, instead of invent.
But the idea of a 140 year patent? Sure, that's probably way too long. The idea you can "tweak" the formula and then extend the patent? That probably needs to go. But getting rid completely would be akin to saying "some people are falsely convicted so we should just get rid of the justice system". Should we revamp it? Absolutely, but not get rid of it. That's insane and absurd.
I agree with what you’re saying. The only thing I’d clarify is that patents and copyright are different. Patents are for “Useful Arts” (inventions for example) while copyright is for the “Science” (a novel for example). Yeah, it terms seem like the opposite of what you’d expect.
To the last guy who asked a question... Its only a negative to not have a patent within a patent system... If there was no patent system then your drug would live or die on its own merits not on some government stamp of approval. Laws are illegitimate anyways because government is illegitimate as it must steal to exist in the first place.
Disney would die if this happened
Disney is a thieving organization anyway. They steal from public domain and then copywrite the material.
good. Disney deserves to die.
You mean Disney would need to find a better way to satisfy their customer other than leverage the government to protect them?
That’s what would happen based on my IP knowledge. So after IP abolition, big corporations like Disney or Apple wouldn’t be ripping off smaller artists & inventors. This is because those corporations can’t make money off of copyright-monopolies or patent-monopolies any more. So there would be no incentive for the corporation to use other people’s works. In fact, Disney as a corporation wouldn’t exist any more. Companies that use IP-monopolies to extort money from people would have to instead switch to manufacturing actual (quality) physical products or providing (quality) services- or they’ll face bankruptcy. And IP-monopolies are not products or services.
Though if Disney doesn’t want to provide actual physical products or services after IP is abolished, the company also might be able to float by with donations from people who like the original art they create. It’s just that after IP abolition, Disney won’t be the horrendously rich & powerful intellectual monopolist it is now. And people will be able to freely use and disseminate the ideas & art Disney creates
I couldn't quite follow the argument about the Bayh-Dole Act, so I went to wikipidea to see what is was about. And funny enough there's a section "Effect on academic innovation" which says that 2022 Stanford study was "unable to conclude that higher inventor’s royalty shares have any effect on the number of invention disclosures or patent applications at a university".
I'd say instead of outright getting rid of Patents and Copyrights is : have them for the written blueprints for history sake; however allow ANYONE to use them however also if they do profit off of them they pay 10% profits to the holder for 7 years or such.
This is the mandatory licensing regime that was discussed, which Richard said was untenable in many situations like pharmaceuticals. Although I can see opposing it on libertarian grounds (if intellectual property _is_ property, it should be exclusively controlled by its owner), I think it's one of the weaker arguments on that side. I think this breaks down because Stephan is right that intellectual property is _not_ true property even by the definitions of strong supporters of Richard's position, but something else. That does not automatically mean it should have no protections, but it argues for allowing different treatment than, say, a cow or a piece of land.
Why 10%? Why not let the copyrights owners choose what is more appropriate terms for licensing based on their industry they know better than the gov how their business model works. 10% of 0 dollar is not a lot.
Stephan could have done a lot better by talking about nonrivalrous goods. If I come up with a tune, you whistling it does not prevent me from doing the same.
I haven’t heard the whole video. That being said. This is a hard subject but I would error on getting rid of them.
this wouldve been a good one to bring up NFT's and how they work with exclusive originals and knockoffs.
What if we base copyright on the earnings of the patentet product? So lets say it cost 1 bilion to invent it and at the earning of 200% of the investment the copyright becomes public domain?
That would create more hassle than it’s worth because you need good empirical methods, and spend many resources to apply those methods, to calculate the investment cost. Good empirical methods may not even exist for particular situations. Fully abolishing all 4 types of IP is the neat way to go to mu knowledge. (Btw, you’re only talking about patents here not copyright. Copyright is for creative expression, patents are for invented products or processes)
If all intellectual property was abolished we would probably see companies Pool their resources to develop new innovations. If everyone can benefit from a invention because it isn't patented then everyone is incentiviced to invest in its development. This might even speed up the rate of innovation as inventors can rely on the support of entire industries instead of a single company.
Absolutely the opposite is true.
I figured the response would be business secrecy and non-disclosure contacts. If your process if more efficient or effective then holding it secret is more profitable than sharing with competitors.
@@MaaveMaave That might not always be possible, some innovations might be relatively easy to reverse-engineer and can be adopted by competitors. And even competing companies cooperate often in order to save costs. So it wouldn't be strange for them to cooperate on research and development.
Perhaps you're right, pooling resources for R&D yet competing for manufacturing. The pooling itself could be regulated by third parties, similar to how clearinghouses regulated bank issuance under free banking.
Pool your resources and "pretend" to work on it until someone else does. Right.
Sorry dude, you can't own an idea
Copyrights are not on ideas, copyrights are on the execution of those ideas. You already cant copyright an idea.
@@marc4770 100% correct. Copyright protects information, not ideas, which are two completely different things. It's sad how many people don't get this.
@@explosives101 it censors and monopolizes information and is thus anti free speech, anti market, and anti liberty. Not the own you think it is dawg
@@marc4770 yeah and by copyrighting the execution of an idea you are violating property rights by using their own physical property to carry out those ideas. IT IS NOT A PROPERTY RIGHT, IT IS A MONOPOLY GRANT
@@nimbletimplekins7601 You are violating physical property rights when you duplicate a rental disk.
Putting aside the natural rights position that doesn’t seem to favor IP, this debate seems to come down to empirical studies. Epstein has a lot of convincing anecdotes while Kinsella provides conclusions by authors/studies that doesn’t seem to support IP in regards to benefitting society. It's hard to evaluate when there are so many counter-factuals in play as well as short term vs long term results if IP was abolished.
IP is a recent invention: barely 200 years old. Humanity survived without it for millennia, and still managed to produce most of the greatest ideas in history.
@@daveBit15 Looks at the human progress chart that spikes around 200 years ago. ;-) I'm sure some IP defenders would point to that as a contributing factor.
@@wolflarson71 You bet they will. But there's more evidence pointing to IP as a restraining factor.
@@daveBit15 Fair
@@daveBit15 I own a business and create software for law firms to automate their processes. If intellectual property rights did not exist and anyone could copy/paste all my code that takes me years to create, then I would never have created it in the first place.
At the very least, patents are way too long and interpreted way too broadly. There might have been reason for 20 year patents back in 1787, but not now. If you can't get it to market and recover development costs in seven years, you don't have any business holding on to it.
What is more valuable? A novel? Or the paper it is printed on? Does it really make sense to, in essence, socialize some of the most valuable property that exists?
You're begging the question by calling it property. It's not limited in the same way--when you share an idea, you don't have to give up its use the way you would a tool or land.
If you restrict or ban books, does it matter?
"Some of te most valuable property that exists"
Intellectual property is not even property...
@@thomasrobinson182 Most definitely! Burning books matters because then you get to learn from experience & truly cherish the teachings LIVING THEM!
@@TheLucasbr152 some of the most valuable things that exist then. Do we want to socialize them?
What is the value of innovation? What is rewarded and how? The answer to these questions shapes how and why these activities are performed.
Is the value of an innovation how many dollars can be extracted from a society or to improve the ways and means of life for a society?
Is it possible to be pro-copyright but anti-patent?
It's possible to be anything. And you can be anti-patent for most things but pro-patent specifically for pharmaceuticals. The issue is you have to realize whatever fancy ideas you have, they have to go through the political system. Good luck getting them to look anything like you wanted at the end of that, and even if you do, wait a few years.
@@Korodarn I realized later that this how debate is moot and all the issues could be solved with NFTs on the blockchain.
Yes. That is the position Henry George ended up with, although he originally opposed both forms of monopoly and continued to think that the copyright terms were a bit too long and too restrictive of derivative works even in the mid 19th century.
Patents are important to incentivize research, but they should be limited to 5-10 years without any possible extensions.
Is it possible to have a private patent system?
no. It's a legislated system, purely artificial. It cannot emerge from contract alone.
@@nskinsella The main way I think of is if there was simply a non profit organization in charge of it all or something. And every company would have to sign off on it or something. But it'd be voluntary to join, making it pretty useless for enforcement. It'd have to just be a voluntary government for patents to exist. The problems at least aren't that unique to it
@@Boristien405 That's not what patents are. Patents are in rem rights--real property rights, good against everyone in the world, not based on contract. You are thinking of a contractual regime, an in personam based system. That is not what IP is. To take an extreme, clear example: A and B agree to some arrangement where B is limited in how it can use information A gives B. that is not IP because this contract between A and B cannot prevent C from using the information as it sees fit. I.e, contracts don't bind third parties. IP does. Moreover, any contractual regime you can think of is going to be very limited and usually impracticable, for similar reasons as to why cartels can't work on the free market.
Imagine Amazon, at the behest of authors, requires all its customers to sign an agreement when they buy a book, not to ever copy the book. Well, first, that agreement would only bind Amazon's customers. IF one of the customers copies the book anyway and uploads it to the Internet; or if he gives or sells the book to a third party, then third parties can copy this information since they didn't enter into any contract with Amazon.
Moreover, imagine a customer B who buys a book for $10 from Amazon, and is forced to sign a contract promising not to copy the book (or make derivative works, etc.). Now he is buying the book *instead of* just grabbing a pirated copy from Z-library or whatever. HE is one of the people actually giving money to Amazon, and to the authors. You are adding on to the $10 cost of the book, a legal contractual liability. That imposes a cost on the customer. That alone makes them less likely to buy the book--instead of that hassle, they might just pirate it instead.
Now this contract can either impose small fines, say, $20, $100, for breaking the contract; or it will impose large fines, say $1M or more. If it imposes a small fine, many customers will just copy the book and pay the small fine. So that won't stop copying. The only way you can really dissuade copying, is to impose huge fines. But that will mean even fewer poeple will buy books from Amazon. Why would I pay $10 for a book and agree to a $1M possible lawsuit? Fuck that. So.. .these models cannot work. The reason they can't work is the nature of information--it's easily copy-able. which means the "authorized" copy of the book from Amazon is not their only source, so they don't have to agree to onerous terms to get the book; they can just get the pirated copy instead. So I think in a free market with no copyright, services like Amazon will exist and people will pay a bit more for convenience and to know they have an "authorized" copy (and to know the author is getting some payment)--just as people will pay more for name-brand Tylenol than for generic acetaminophen. But they won't pay *that* much more: they might pay $1 or $3 or $5 or $10 for a kindle version of a book for convenience, instead of the hassle of finding a pirated copy; but they won't also "pay" the cost of assuming a $1M legal liability! So if you are an author or book seller and you want to persuaded peopel to buy your books when they *don't have to* (since piracy is rampant and fairly easy) you have to give them something *extra* (like: convenience; ease of use; the quality seal of authenticity etc.) NOT an additional cost like a huge contractual liability penalty clause! The whole thing is ridiculous. IP can never work, not even contractual simulations of it.
Say goodbye to inverters spending their life dedicated to some project.
That's not how invention happens anyway. It's usually a "flash of genius" a novel combination of previously existing ideas the person was exposed to by virtue of being near other people and other ideas that were necessary for their new concept to form.
And none of that is to say it isn't a valuable result that deserves compensation. But compensation does not require a monopoly privilege grant. Entrepreneurial insight gives far more options than that. Some inventors who have no idea how to market their product may not be able to make money because of that, but this is like the artist who can't find his niche market or tablet pcs that existed before iPad. Sometimes the idea is ahead of its time.
@@Korodarn I hold two patents and work for a firm that has hundreds. You don't at all know what you are talking about. Patents are literally classified as new inventions or improvements on existing product. Both have different rules and protections. A patent doesn't give you a monopoly. It gives you a time period to expand and profit off of your invention before someone can copy you. If your product can be produced differently or with slight alterations then those would not fall under the patent. Seriously, it is sad how so many people think they are coming up with revolutionary ideas when that was the norm for most of civilization. Patents are a relatively new idea and this idea pulled us out of the dark ages and into the industrial revolution.
@@Korodarn P.S. the IPad probably has has over a thousand patents protecting different parts and programming. And yes it builds off of and uses some software and parts from previous products. All owned by Apple.
And Apple creating different coding to produce the same functions is proof it is not a monopoly. Just an example of how little you understand about patents.
Debate starts in NY city, already off on a bad foot. Everyone in this debate fell for the govt vax
Why assume that? Many probably got it because the city forces it. That they complied doesn't mean they agreed with the mandate.
Also, even if they did comply voluntarily, people can have different opinions than you on some things and still be right on other things. It's just stupid to think people can have no good ideas because they have bad ideas on something else.
*And I don't agree with you about the vax either, as another person who refuses to take it due to the mandates - but thinks it might have a minor benefit to me (as someone who had and already recovered from COVID - I still see the evidence showing small benefits from having it for people in my risk category - even considering the small risks of heart issues on the other side - but I don't tend to have allergy issues ).
@@Korodarn haha 😂
I really wanted to be sympathetic with Kinsela, but I couldn't help but get the impression he's a guy who doesn't really believe in the case he's making deep down, like a debate challenge in school when you're forced to take one side regardless of whether or not you really think it's true. However, I do think copyright should not be life of creator plus 70 -- that's insane -- it should just be 50 years from initial date of publication/release. Giving a writer, musician, artist, etc, half a century to make money off their work is more than enough.
He doesn't really believe in making this utilitarian style argument. He prefers the principled propertarian approach that he's written about extensively elsewhere. But he absolutely believes that IP as a whole should be abolished. Kinsella is an anarcho-capitalist, so there would be no state to enforce IP if it were up to him, and he does not think it could be re-created through contracts because he thinks valid contracts conform to title transfer theory and not mere promises.
*What title transfer theory basically means is that you can't use force to make someone fulfill any promise. You can only go after the other party for property that you transferred over to them. And nothing like the current system could be supported under that limitation.
@@Korodarn Got it. Thanks for explaining the nuance on that. I need to look up Kinsella's ideas and arguments and go deeper into his principles. Like I said, I'm generally sympathetic but I do think a balance needs to be struck as the current copyright and IP laws are onerous.
23:14 It would only cost a billion dollars to develop a drug in the presence of immense subsidies offered to competitors, as well as with the inflationary effects of preventing the individual researchers from learning their specialty at work as opposed to paying inflated tuition rates just for a chance at an internship.
It’s expensive to pay a scarce industry professional full-time, unless you have pool of cheap interns who do the grunt work. But due to government grants, university education places a choke on educated workers, who are effectively released into the labor market as the sole discretion of government due to the insurmountable cost created by governmental ‘assistance.’
Sounds like an idea the CCP would come up with.
Wow I never heard this "argument" before.
The fact that Chinese industry doesn’t observe copyright is really to their benefit and is part of the reason why and how businesses and manufacturers from elsewhere do business in China. The other part of it of course are the taxes and IP systems that exist in countries with regulations increased by governments, which push businesses away from their domestic markets.
If you already know the CCP are the foremost statists of the day, and statists like them in governments across the globe ultimately see eye to eye with them evidenced by a widespread war in viruses regime, then it shouldn’t be a stretch to realize how people in elite circles will ultimately side with each other versus letting anyone else live independently from their political oversight and control.
Patent drug have terribly harm the response to the pandemic, without disproportionate patent incentives early treatment would have been deployed much earlier.. actually early treatment is still not a thing in most western countries. absolutely insane.
Copyrights are good, it provides an incentive to create
I guess just mouthbreathing this slogan you heard in high school is easier than actually watching the debate and listening to it and thinking about it
@@PropertyandFreedomSociety I'm not even American bro. Also I know a waste of time to when I see one.
Also most tech companies sell their copyright whatever to other companies at a price. So still an incentive to create.
Finally a rational mind in this comment section
If the man who invented the wheel got a patent on the distribution and production of wheels in what reality would that provide an incentive to create? What an insane notion you just put forward, maybe think for 5 seconds before you repeat garbage sloganeering from the monopolist rightsholder class. Patents and copyrightd HALT human progress by monopolizing ideas, things that are neither scarce nor a physical resource, in the hands of a select few rightsholders, not allowing anyone to use these ideas to further innovate. Creativity doesn't exist in a vacuum, every invention is based off of inventions that came before it. Without the wheel we wouldn't have cars, without fire we wouldn't have the combustible engine, without spears we wouldn't have bows or swords or firearms, etc.
Yes but that doesn't justify its existence, IP is not property, someone copying your work is not theft, it does not matter that it does create an incentive to make things a law should not exist where it violates your own property, IP stops people from using their property in anyway they see fit.
Copyright blocks innovation more so than it does help invent it in the first place.
IP must be abolished, with IP abolished, pornstars would have to look for real jobs now as all their stuff would be stored onto a server where it's free to access because enough people will donate to keep it up and operational, meaning almost no one would ever pay for porn again and those useless whores will actually have to get a real job and same with onlyfans females they'll also have to get a real job as someone could hack into onlyfans and upload all the content onto the server. You would also have a community of people uploading the videos onto that website and server.
It will be the best way to discourage degenerate whorish behaviour as it will be punished.
They deserve nothing less.
But for things like music, video games, movies, tv shows, if they're good you should pay for it as they have real jobs.
You are a bad person if you don't pay for that stuff, if however you pay for porn videos you are actually a bad person, they do not deserve money all their content should be for free.
Always pirate porn never give them a dime.
This would be a utopia.
57:40 if you put it in the public…
Copyright and trademark laws have to be enforced. If someone or another company can just rip off all your hard work, where is the incentive? The little guy will never have a chance. Furthermore, preventing copy cats and "fakes" ensures quality and safety. Think about if you think you are buying brand name protective gear for example, the cheap knockoff that looks like the real deal and even has the same logo, then you have an accident and it doesn't protect you. Maybe reformation of the laws, but not abolishment, that's crazy.
The market will even out who wins and who loses. People prefer quality, cheap knock off companies will not survive.
Brand protection and copyright are completely different things. What do you mean "rip off all your hard work?" If it was so hard, why is it so easy to rip off? If it's easy to rip off, then it should be!
@@drewp.weiner2473 defferentiation is something to consider though. What if all the IP is copied. Consumer can actually sue the quality producer and not the rip off. Liability also comes into question
I agree, even in the industry, competiotion will diminish, innovation will be stagnant or diminish. The risk of liability will increase even more for well established companies. And there would be little differentiation in the end product or service.
@Andre Catenani I don't see it that way. If I can patent it, that protects me or my invention from the deep pockets who could just take my idea to market immediately, whereas I would have to fund raise, etc. Having a copyright and a patent ensures the little guy has a chance.