- 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.”
There are plenty of examples of open sharing systems that are functional.
Science, for example. Nobody ‘owns’ the formulas that calculate orbits or the underlying mathematics that AI models are built on like Transformer networks or convolutional networks. The information is openly shared and given away to everyone that wants it and it is so powerful it has completely reshaped society everywhere on the Earth (except the Sentinel Islands).
Open Source projects, like Linux, are the foundation of the modern tech world. The ‘IP’ is freely available and you can copy or modify it as much as you’d like. Linus ‘owns’ the Linux project but anyone is free to take a copy of the Linux source code and modify it to whatever extent that they would like and form their own project.
Much of the software and services that people use are built on top of open source tools made by volunteers, for free; and most of the useful knowledge and progress for human society results from breakthroughs made in the sciences, who’s discoveries are also free and openly shared.
Plenty of chemical syntheses are patented. Biological catalysts and precursors are patented every day. No one owns the rights to orbital calculations, because that would be like patenting the concept of a square root — it’s not novel or even complex within the field.