- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter (now X) and Square (now Block), sparked a weekend’s worth of debate around intellectual property, patents, and copyright, with a characteristically terse post declaring, “delete all IP law.”
X’s current owner Elon Musk quickly replied, “I agree.”
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Musk is out to delete all laws that don’t benefit him, and replace them with harsh private rules that are not accountable to the people.
So delete all pharmaceutical IP to make drugs accessible to everyone and save taxpayers trillions?
“Noooo, not like that!”
Lol we all know trump would put pharmaceuticals on the exemption list.
This is why it’s a mixed bag for me. IP law is kinda important in a capitalist system, which, for better or worse, that’s what we have. If someone comes up with a wonder drug that outright cures addiction or something, you’d want that person to be able to recoup their costs before a bigger organization with more capital swoops in and undercuts them on production costs until they’re the sole supplier of the drug. The hepatitis C cure drug selling for $70,000 is a great example of this quandary; there’s millions of dollars worth of research and clinical trials that went into developing the drug, you’d want the company to be able to recuperate the costs of developing it or else there’s less incentive to do something similar for other diseases down the line. Also, though, $70,000 or go fucking die is an outrageous statement.
Of course, what we have for IP law in practice is a bastardized monster, where corporations exploit the fuck out of it to have monopoly control over important products like insulins and life-saving medications that cost cents to produce and allow them to sell for hundreds a dose. That’s not the intent of IP law, IMO, and that doesn’t really serve anyone.
idk i think our incentive should be to cure diseases with public funding and make people healthy instead of for profit but what do i know
I agree, though I will note that I have often found that there is a non-trivial gap between what is and what ought to be.
Companies will not — ever — dump hundreds of millions/billions into developing a drug only to have it be sold at cost or even worse, completely losing out on it when a competitor sells a copy of it at a price you can’t match.
And even if they did, they’d very quickly go bankrupt.
We may not like it, but that’s the system that we have. Some form of IP law should exist to encourage these companies to continue putting out medicines that better our lives, it’s just that our current ones go way too far.
We already fund the research of new drugs almost entirely through publicly funded projects which then HAND OVER the patent rights to whichever company has the most former board members in the executive branch at the time.
I watched it happen in real time during covid while working for the DPH. Those companies produce NOTHING. They are the literal obstacle to creating new medicines and making them widely available.
I’m against the context of the main post but putting on a cape for medical patents is wild. The entirety of healthcare in america is inexcusable. Let’s stay focused on the AI tech oligarchs robbing us of our futures and attempting to frame it as a concern with intellectual property.
If you only funded drugs through public funding, that means the government has a say in what drugs get funded and which don’t, meaning any and all drugs that don’t affect the broadest number of people simply won’t get funded.
Drugs will no longer be for all people, it’ll be strictly the people that vote for the government in charge. So… No hormone treatments, no birth control, no vaccines, no aids research, nothing that doesn’t explicitly align with the government.
First of all, governments already do fund all the research.
Even in your hypothetical, thats just one government. It doesn’t stop medical advancement entirely just because one dictatorship stops funding research. It moves elsewhere. When nazi germany declared that nobody would receive funding for anything outside of Aryan research ^tm the scientists just left to a country that wasn’t barbarically stupid.
Also, everything in your final paragraph is stuff that is happening now, in america, under the capitalist organization of the economy which gives all the rights to a private company after publicly funding the research and development of their drugs. It makes no difference, save the fact that now the authoritarian government in power has consolidated billions of dollars for rich capitalists who will gladly accept the orders to no longer produce those medicines while remaining disgustingly wealthy.
Even if you believe in the delusional idea that private companies are funding the development of novel treatments entirely on their own the fact remains that drugs are currently, as we speak, not for all people. I am pointing out the solution to that problem, and the response was to point out how, if we did what I said, then what’s already happening now would be the consequence.
Except no, they don’t.
If it’s state funded then that’s obviously a different matter.
But usually it’s a company making drugs, and they’d go bust if they spent billions developing a drug and got zero money back. Then there would be far fewer drugs made.
Be practical. Letting people die for ideological reasons is not a good thing.
How, when more companies would be able to develop the same drug? And they don’t develop drugs, they develop ways to extend their patents.
More companies will develop that drug.
But think of it this way. You’re the CEO of a pharmaceutical company that makes drugs, vaccines, etc that saves lives. You do this for a profit.
You’re presented with a plan to make a drug that, idk, lessens the symptoms of Crohn’s Disease. It’ll cost $2 billion to create and bring to market.
After it’s done being created, and the drug spends 10+ years in clinical testing, it’s on shelves. You have to price each box at $10 in order to break even after 5 years, so you do so.
But the law has changed, now anybody can manufacture the drug. A competitor who didn’t foot any of the development costs or do any of the hard work is selling each box at $0.80. you can’t compete with that, you make an enormous loss and your company edges closer to bankruptcy.
One of your workers comes to you with plans for a $2bn project that will hopefully reduce migraines. Given lessons learned from the previous example, do you go ahead with the plan? Will the board even let you?
I agree that IP laws in the sector need to be pared down, but scrapping them entirely would prevent any company from creating new drugs, as they’d be absolutely certain they wouldn’t be able to recoup development and regulatory hurdle costs.
In an ideal world, all drugs would be made by governments, for a loss, and open sourced, so the market could compete on price. But that’s not the world we live in.
I wrote a long winded reply but honestly I’ll just say that your second paragraph is entirely based on fiction and your final paragraph is precisely what for profit medicine is designed to do. Profit is a purely ideological drive, medicine and healthcare do not need profits to exist. The post office does not need to make money. It exists because we HAVE to have it.
You can go see for yourself. Moderna did not single handedly make the covid vaccine. They do not and should not have the right to deny anyone the right to produce it as cheaply as necessary to provide it to their populations. I can go deeper if you want but if this doesn’t show you that we are saying the same thing I’m going to have doubts about this being in good faith.
It’s not fiction, that’s the reality.
Profit is a purely ideological drive, medicine and healthcare do not need profits to exist.
No shit. Everyone knows that. But it does exist. That’s the world we live in. Income tax doesn’t need to exist, but it does, and things would go wrong if you suddenly stopped paying it.
Moderna did not single handedly make the covid vaccine
Who said they did? Many companies did, and some had government or university help.
I can go deeper if you want
Go as deep as you like. I’ve already explained the situation, though.
I am speaking in good faith. How do you go about avoiding companies simply refusing to create new medications when they know for a fact making new ones would cost billions and they’d never get the money back?
I don’t like that that’s the situation. I want companies to make medications and sell them at a loss, but that’s a fantasy world. I’m being pragmatic. We can improve IP laws without completely killing off future medicine development.
“Just, like, don’t make profit, broooo” would be nice, but that’s not how the world works.
The problem I mostly have is even when those costs are recouped most companies fight tooth and nail to keep the prices high and unaffordable in order to line the pockets of investors.
Yes, 100%.
In the US the tax payer subsidizes almost all drug research. Between 2010 and 2019 the NIH spent $184 Billion on all but 2 drugs approved by the FDA.
It worked out to about $1.5 Billion for each R&D product with a novel target and about $600 mill for each R&D product with multiple targets.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10148199/
Or
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama-health-forum/fullarticle/2804378
The cost to develop each drug is between about $1 and $2.5 Billion
I’m not sure how much is subsidized outside of NIH but I’d imagine other countries are doing the same.
Why should companies own the whole IP or perhaps why should they have any ownership if most of the funding is from the public?
This is a great point. I know that some pharmas actually do internally funded research, it’s a thing, it happens, but it’s completely dwarfed by shareholder giveaways and government subsidies ofc.
The development of new medications should be 100% funded by governments and the IP that comes out of it should be 100% if the government, aka the people.
Governments are the ones that do the investments of projects that don’t directly make money but are good for humanity.
You don’t like that and the hepac drug can suddenly cost 70 dollars
You’re right.
I see the point you’re aiming at, but it’s not little companies discovering new drugs it’s giant corporations (often on the back of government research money) who then ‘swoop in’ to protect their own profits while people in underdeveloped nations die of tuberculosis or whatever because they would rather make money than save lives.
You might be surprised how small medical research labs can be. The lady responsible for nanolipid particles used in transporting rNA vaccines, in similar fashion to how an organelle gets packaged in membrane and cast out, spent decades cruising on bare minimum public funding.
What costs money is testing phases, including a lab to hold and propogate immortal cell lines and later production lines to create enough doses for thousands of human trials.
Although tbh I don’t expect the USA to be upholding strict drug safety standards in the near future.
I was speaking generally and obviously there are exceptions and contributions from all over the place. But it’s not tiny labs like that that hold a death-grip on the patents to drugs that are being sold for absurd amounts of money that are far out of reach of the people who need them. Also while I recognize that this kind of research is expensive it must also be recognized that much of that research is funded, directly or indirectly, by the US government through the National Institutes of Health, Centers for Disease Control, etc, so the fact that these big corporations are effectively getting a hand-out and then charging an arm and a leg for it sticks in my craw. But then maybe I’m just weird for thinking that human life is more important than quarterly profits.
What costs money is testing phases, including a lab to hold and propogate immortal cell lines and later production lines to create enough doses for thousands of human trials.
Thank you. These arguments are always hard to read. Sure, small labs are where it usually starts, but without enormous and risky investments, we would never have the drugs we have today. Most of these investments fail miserably, so one successful drug must cover the costs of ten unsuccessful ones. Nobody would do that if their IP weren’t protected. It’s more about reputation than facts when it comes to this topic.
Unless it were completely government funded, but that’s clearly not was Illegal Immigrant Billionaire Elon Musk and the Orange Felon are proposing so yeah, IP Laws applying to Pharmaceuticals all the way.
These people are threats to our actual lives.
Honestly at this point, poor people have no form of IP protection whatsoever, even before chat GPT it was commonplace for megacorps to just take other peoples work and profit from and now that LLMs are here its outright routine. So why keep that shit when it only benefits the rich.
They want to do this so they can feed their ai models.
You can tell China is making strides when suddenly IP laws are a nuisance rather than a fundamental value of the American system lol
Our models
The only reason musk would want this is to put his name officially on ideas he bought. Presumably on patents and whatnot.
Yeah bullshit they want to delete IP law. Go ahead and copy Square, Xhitter, Tesla, SpaceX, etc and watch them explode.
That’s probably better than what we have now, but still very short of ideal. Here’s my proposition:
- keep trademark law as-is
- cut patents to 5-7 years, with a one-time extension if the holder can demonstrate need
- cut copyright to 14 years (original 1790 Copyright Act duration), with a one-time explicit extension, approved based on need
- have existing patents and copyright expire at their original term, the above (for works patented/copyrighted within the term), or half the above (for works copyrighted outside the term), whichever is shorter
That would solve most of the problems while keeping the vast majority of the benefits.
This is the way.
I see the value in trademarks because it prevents people from selling knock-offs. In some cases (medicine, machine tools) using a knock-off could be deadly.
For patents, I don’t think it should be one-size-fits-all. A modern drug takes a lot longer to develop than some e-commerce thing like one-click ordering. Different categories of thing could get different lengths of patent protection. Also, IMO, the clock should start once something is available in the market. Again, I’m thinking of medicine. Something might be working in the lab so it’s patented, but going from lab to store shelves is not quick. If the clock starts immediately, then that mostly benefits huge and rich pharma companies that can move extremely quickly.
I strongly believe that if we have copyrights, they should be short with an optional renewal that’s also short. Too much of our culture is locked up by companies like Disney. They shouldn’t be able to hold onto it for more than a century. That’s absurd. For the most part, media makes the vast majority of its money in months. 14 years gives the creator not only the most lucrative period, but also the vast majority of the tail of the distribution. It would also be good if corporate-owned copyright had a much shorter term than copyrights owned by individuals. And, we also need to have a way for people to get their own creations back, by say cancelling the copyright assignment.
A modern drug takes a lot longer to develop than some e-commerce thing like one-click ordering.
Sure, that’s what the one-time extension is for.
The way they use patents, however, is completely abusive. In general:
- patent the process to make the drug
- release the drug
- around the time the patent is set to expire, patent a slightly different process, and get authorities to ban the old one
- repeat
Patents last 20-25 years, which is just ridiculous for pretty much anything. Here’s how I envision the process for medicines:
- patent the process to make the drug
- struggle to get through approval process w/ FDA - can take years
- renew patent and release drug -> approved because you obviously haven’t recouped your costs
- after 5-7 years, you have recouped your R&D money and established your brand, so the patent is no longer important (i.e. most people still buy name-brand Tylenol because it’s trusted, despite cheaper alternatives being just as effective)
For something like a phone:
- patent the process to make the device
- release device
- file for renewal -> rejected because you’ve already made up your R&D costs and no longer need a monopoly
14 years gives the creator not only the most lucrative period, but also the vast majority of the tail of the distribution
Agreed, as well as with your point about corporations. I used 14 because it has precedent, but honestly 10 years is more reasonable. It needs to be long enough that a work that didn’t get mainstream attention in the first few years but gets it later doesn’t get sucked up by a competitor, but short enough that it’s still relevant culturally when it expires.
No, that’s liberal and Megacorps can’t rip you off, not something Trump likes.
It’s old-school liberal, as in closer to libertarian. Trump courted libertarians, and he claims to be wanting to legitimately downsize things.
Here’s a rough history of Copyright law in the US:
- 1790 Copyright Act under George Washington
- 1975 - Democratic majority in both houses, Republican President
- 1998 - Republican majority in both houses, Democrat President
So it’s pretty easy to see that both major parties support copyright extension.
I doubt he’ll do it, but I could see him doing it just to “own the libs” since Clinton was the last to sign a copyright extension.
Also, patents shouldn’t be filable once prior art exists.
Aka Nintendo patenting game mechanics 30 years after the fact to try and sue Palworld.
Also game mechanics and UI features being tied to existing functionality (Amazon’s “one click”, Apple’s “swipe to unlock”) should not be considered novel.
Also, patents shouldn’t be filable once prior art exists.
That’s the case today, it’s just that the patent office accepts far more patents than it should. Those patents absolutely don’t hold up in court, but it really shouldn’t get to that point either.
The problem here is enforcement, not law.
On March 16th, 2013, America passed the American Inventors Act, which transitioned the United States to a First-to-File system.
I would still keep patents at about 20 years. There’s some nuance that needs to change to prevent, say, Nintendo from retroactively patenting Pokemon after Palworld comes out, but yeah patent law needs a colonic.
I’d be okay with 20 or even 30 year copyright terms on complete works, but I would be more open on derivative works and fair use.
I want stricter trademark law. Trademark should be about knowing where your products come from. A manufacturer gets right of way over a mark so that they can defend their own reputation, and I’ll help them defend that mark because I want to know where the goods I buy come from.
It should not be legal to buy a commodity item and slap your brand on it. I see this a lot in the tool market. There seems to be two 6" jointers in production in the world today, the one JET makes, and the one everyone else sells. Wen, Craftsman and Porter Cable among many others sell the same 6" jointer. Speaking of Craftsman, that brand is now owned by Stanley Black & Decker, who also owns Porter Cable, DeWalt, and several others. Most of what they use this for is to sell mutually incompatible yet functionally similar power tools so you have to buy more batteries. They might design or build some of their tools in-house, but many of them they buy from some other company and just put their stickers on. Is it, or is it not, a “Craftsman”?
Then you’ve got Amazon, Temu, AliExpress and other Chinese dropshipping platforms. They make a whole bunch of shit and then register nineteen or twenty bullshit trademarks to sell the same thing under. I would make that illegal; if you have a brand that is suitable for selling a given item, you’re not allowed another for that purpose. Trademarks are supposed to reduce consumer confusion, you’re using them to increase consumer confusion. If I am elected dictator, that kind of behavior will earn you a public trepanning.
It should not be legal to buy a commodity item and slap your brand on it.
I disagree. However, I do think you should be obligated to disclose the source of that commodity so customers can use reviews of similar products to get an idea of the quality of yours. You’re still on the hook for warranties and whatnot, but you should need to disclose what you did and didn’t design/build.
This goes doubly for where something was made. You can’t just slap a “Made in USA” sticker on something that’s made elsewhere, you need to disclose where things come from. Such as, “Designed in USA, parts made in Vietnam, assembled in Mexico” or whatever.
if you have a brand that is suitable for selling a given item, you’re not allowed another for that purpose.
Would this apply to product segmentation? For example, Toyota owns the Lexus brand, and they segment their products under those different brands. They reuse a ton of parts though, so your Toyota is much more similar to a Lexus than it is to other economy vehicles in its market segment.
Walking that line is quite difficult, and I think it largely misses the point. I’m not confused when I buy a ATHEOTS or whatever BS brand they come up, I know I’m buying cheap knock-off stuff. The problem here is how quickly those brands pop up and disappear, and that should be illegal IMO (you can’t just rebrand when your company gets a bad reputation). But maybe that was your point, I’m just saying it’s less a trademark issue and more company restructuring shenanigans.
To tackle this problem, I’m happy to remove limited liability protections once a company gets above a certain size. But that’s a bit outside the scope of the IP law discussion.
| but you should need to disclose what you did and didn’t design/build.
A specific example I have in mind: James Wright of youtube channel Wood By Wright did a video comparing like 24 hand planes, from a bunch of different brands and sources from Ace Hardware to fucking AmazonBasics. He noticed that there were basically 3 manufacturers; Jorgensen seems to offer a unique product, and then everyone else were offering slight variations on the same two designs. So there’s a manufacturer somewhere in China that churns these out, and will stamp your brand on them plus you have the option of plastic handles, aluminum or brass thrust wheel, etc. to fine tune the price point you want to hit.
That’s what I want to kill. In this case, if it’s made by Happy Clappy Fun Time Shenzhen Co. Ltd. it needs to be branded as such. Jury’s still out if I’ll allow things like the iPhone that are “Designed in Cupertino California, Made In China.” A product that is designed by a company for that company but then they contract out the manufacture.
Product segmentation? I’m fine getting rid of a lot if not all of that. All cars are luxury cars now. And what good does it do us allowing SB&D to have DeWalt and Craftsman? “We have two brands (actually four, with Porter Cable and Black & Decker) of cordless tools with very similar yet mutually incompatible battery standards and not quite equivalent product lineups, for no reason that benefits the customer.” Perfect, yeah, get on the hobbling wheel, you can explain why we should let you keep doing this between screams.
| I’m not confused when I buy a ATHEOTS or whatever BS brand they come up, I know I’m buying cheap knock-off stuff.
There’s one of two possibilities here:
-
Happy Clappy Fun Time Shenzhen Co. Ltd. is doing it themselves, registering trademarks, selling goods with that brand just long enough for the public to catch on, and then dropping that brand and coming out with another. This should be illegal and impossible. Like the mechanism by which the trademark system works should not be able to function this way.
-
Some Fuck In His Apartment is ordering out of Happy Clappy’s Shit We’ll Rebrand For You catalog. So Reginald Q. Flybynight registers APOWEDG and sells mousepads and shit for a few weeks on Amazon. This…doesn’t need to be a business model me allow. If Happy Clappy wants their shit sold on Amazon, they can list it there themselves. We don’t need the illusion of competition or market choice, we don’t need prices elevated by Some Fuck Who’s Also There…Trademark law is there to guarantee the source of goods. Reginald Q. Flybynight isn’t the source of the goods so he has no need or right to brand the goods. All that does is obfuscate who to sue if the goods are faulty or dangerous.
I’m sick of living in a world of “Someone somewhere made this I think.”
Rebrand
How do you feel about things like t-shirts where the design is made by the seller, but the shirt itself is produced elsewhere. It follows the same model, but generally they’re used as merch by a variety of different groups, from music artists to influencers to charity groups.
Are you expecting something like, “Designed by Local Company in Local City, manufactured by Happy Clappy Fun Time in Shenzen”?
Honestly that particular business model already pretty much works the way I’d want it to.
The T-shirts are made in tremendous quantities by the likes of Hanes or Gildan with a tag in the collar that shows the company name/logo and country of origin. Quite often the artist or IP owner of the printed art will include a trademark or copyright symbol as appropriate into the artwork. The printing company often goes uncredited.
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The GPL relies on copyright law to keep software free.
Making source available suddenly makes it free of copyright
No it doesn’t. The GPL provides a license to copy it as long as certain conditions are met. Availability has nothing to do with it.
Okay but reverse engineering is no longer under any protection because no ip
Yeah, we’d have to shift tactics. But, without IP law protections, the hacker community would double down on reverse engineering and binary patching. Debian etc. would still be available, but you’d also see spins on Adobe, Apple, Microsoft, and Google software based on decompiling, patching, and rebuilding, or just game genie / PC game cracks binary patching based on offset and signature.
The DMCA would dissolve and encysted data and the expected to be decrypted on the fly (“streaming only”) would just be published fully decrypted.
It would be a revolutionary shift, but I’m not convinced it would be worse.
What would be worse is keeping IP law, but only having it enforced by million dollar yearly budget teams of lawyers and not protecting creators of having their works fed to AI and regurgitated as slop.
I’m cool with it. I think we should require almost everything to be public domain. But I think those personally contributing to the public domain should be recognized, and no one should be allowed to get rich off of it.
A government stipend to make public art or open source software or literature or whatever sounds pretty great. It’s hard to see how we get there from here. But it’d be great.
France has something like it for artists I think.
A great starting point is guaranteeing a basic standard of living for all. No exceptions.
I’d like to get back to ‘for limited time’. Patents 10 years, no extensions. Copyright, 10 years, no extensions. Trademarks indefinite as long as the owner still has a meaningful business still operating and using the trademark ( this one is tricky to define well).
It’s still a misguided policy aimed at furthering the lie of individualism. Which why we have so many ridiculous true stories of parallel invention, and scientists racing to the patent office to claim full credit.
These people are building on the works of all those who came before. All should benefit from the results. And all should enjoy a basic standard of living, instead of this cut throat first past this finish line system, where all who fall behind will suffer.
I view the patent process as furthering the ability of others to benefit from the results: without patents, the only way to keep clones of your product from immediately appearing on the market is obfuscation and trade secrets. Patents grant a limited monopoly, but at the price of full disclosure. That full disclosure serves a useful social benefit as others can learn and innovate on what was done before. The limited monopoly encourages innovation because it helps people get exclusive rights to sell their work.
There’s a lot of bad patent behavior with patent trolls, etc. The duration of the patents should be relatively short and not extensible. But I think the disclosure aspect of the patent process does further overall innovation.
We can require disclosure without providing a government backed monopoly. Especially when the modern world has corporations enjoying the benefits of the monopoly, at the expense of individuals.
You’re cool with it until you realize that they only want to do this to personally gain from it. And guaranteed will protect their own IP, and the IP of every large corporation.
It’s just that you yourself and small businesses will no longer have the benefit of intellectual property. Megacorps can steal whatever they want with impunity since they are the only true holders of intellectual property.
That sounds good on paper until you look at the long history of these people and how everything they do is entirely focused on their own benefit over that of others. They gain something to win here, guaranteed they aren’t going to let themselves lose on anything either.
It’s the same sort of situation as AI regulation. Sam Altman and openai want the United States to crack down and make it extremely difficult to develop new models. Why? So that they don’t have any competition. They already got their foot in the door they want to close the door for anyone else.
This is very likely the same sort of situation.
You really need to read something that isn’t capitalist propaganda.
Kinda feel like they said something like
“I think everyone should have food”
And you responded with
“you want a Walmart on every block in the world?? do you even know the environmental impact that will have? Poor people are really to blame anyways because they’re not voting with their wallets enough”
How an asshole can mess something up is entirely independent of how a proper implementation might not mess up
Edit to say: I think this is what they meant in their comment about (American) capitalist propaganda; You dont realise your implicit bias enforcing that it must be a capitalist implementing it without any external input.
To the rest of the world he’s just an infamous citizen in a dying country, who would never realistically have 1/10th the pull needed to enforce that BS internationally; by starting the conversation at best he’d speed up external implementations.
Removing copyright entirely is a bridge too far.
Just roll it back to a reasonable time limit (I dunno, 7 years?), and categorically reject all further lobbying attempts from Disney and the like.
This is called being a “reactionary.” You don’t want to drastically change the system in ways that’ll make things better for all. You just want to return to a previous status quo you enjoyed.
Good. I don’t like them but clearly IP law is a net negative on our society and peoppe have been argueing against it forever now.
Now that it interferes with me I’m against it. As soon as it’s absence causes me any grief I’ll be for it again.
I see someone read “Chokepoint Capitalism” 3 years later.
I think ip laws are important but need to be changed. One example are things that are funded by tax dollars. They can’t own the ip of something we funded even if partially funded. Maybe let them hold the ip until they recoup their cost.
I also think that it is OK for companies to have ip, but it needs to be shorter. Like, they get 10 years or they earn 10x their cost on developing it.
Im not saying my exact ideas are perfect, but just an example of how ip should not last for as long as it does.
I’m reminded of that onion article, “Heartbreaking: The Worst Person You Know Just Made An Excellent Point.” on one hand, as an independant musician who has many friends in different artistic fields, we all agree IP law is a net negative for us all. the threat of wrongly being accused of copyright infingement and being punished for it is very real, whereas the threat of having our work stolen is non-existant and wouldn’t matter anyway because we’re making fuck-all money in the first place. and the fact that we can’t legally iterate on existing music the way humans have for as long as we’ve had music until very recently is just criminal. it makes me absolutely sick
on the other hand, if IP law exists to protect small creators but in actuality protects corporate interests, and suddenly corporate interests think IP is bad, then we should be very worried. i said earlier that the threat of our work being stolen is minimal because we’re not making money, but with all this generative AI bullcrap, they’re using our art as raw fuel to displace artists entirely and burn the planet to a crisp. it makes me even more sick
