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.”
Small companies have defend themselves from Apple. People make money from their inventions and writings. There are tons of examples. You’re creating this idea of unbeatable huge corpos that isn’t true. They don’t always win, you can easily prove with with a 1 minute Google search.
They also don’t want it just because of AI, this would enable them to steal and mass produce any IP anyone makes. This includes physical inventions.
Also copyright didn’t exist for a long time and neither did the Internet or global trade. Times change. We went millennia without many things, it doesn’t automatically make them wrong or bad. What a silly basis.
The cases where large companies do win won’t make news though. “Large companies settles with individual” isn’t really headline material now, is it?
Also, small companies != people. Neither me nor you are a company and even small companies have significantly more resources available to them than someone who just created the next Lord of the Rings and didn’t see a penny.
There are significantly more companies who would rather start killing politicians than see IP law gone. They rake in billions of shareholder value, much moreso than any AI company out there.
I never argued that copyright law is necessarily wrong or bad just because we went millenia without it. What I am arguing is that these laws do not allow people to create intellectual works as people in the past were no less artistic than we are today - maybe even moreso.
Have you seen the impact of IP law on science? It’s horrible. No researcher sees any money from their works - rather they must pay to lose their “rights” and have papers published. Scientific journals have hampered scientific progress and will continue to do so for as long as IP law remains. I would not be surprised if millions of needless deaths could have been prevented if only every medical researcher had access to research.
IP law serves solely large companies and independent artists see a couple of breadcrumbs. Abolishing IP law - or at the very least limiting it to a couple of years at most - would have hardly any impact on small artists. The vast, vast, VAST majority of artists make hardly any money already. Just check Bandcamp or itch.io and see how many millions of artists there are who will never ever see success. They do not benefit from IP law - so why should we keep it for the top 0.1% of artists who do?
Ok, and not every time a person wins there’s a headline either, this is a moot point.
So, what is your point? People can win against big companies, even over IP. It has been done before, if you want I can list a bunch for you. I just researched to make sure I wasn’t off base. You don’t always have to have the most money to win. You know why? Because of IP law, the very thing you want to destroy.
Ok, and? Because a company makes money due to X doesn’t automatically make X a bad thing. I’ve not seen one good plan laid out on how destorying IP would help the common man, it doesn’t.
No, but you are clearly implying something with “Copyright didn’t exist for millenia. It didn’t stop authors from writing books.” This ignores that those authors couldn’t have their work downloaded and spread across the globe in minutes. You are bringing this up to prove a point, but give how much things have changes over the last few hundred years, the point falls flat. It is irrelevant once you look at all the nuance and reasons why and how they were able to create.
They do allow them. They allow them to make money off of their art. Back in the day you didn’t have an interconnected global economy, you didn’t have to worry about retirement or your 401k, of course it was easier back then, late stage capitalism didn’t set in. But IP laws are what protect creators these days, so they can take a year off of work and write a book and still be able to eat.
Yes, absolutely a good point. But because a system is broken is not a reason to get rid of it. The legal system is broken and millionaires just get away with crimes, should we just get rid of all the laws? No. We should work to make them better.
Source needed. Because this is a bold claim, that based on what I can find, is not true. People sell IP to companies all the time, so yes they then benefit from it, but the creator of the IP gets paid.
You brought up how lives have probably been lost because of scientific journal IP. How many lives do you think will be lost when big pharma realizes there’s no money in creating a vaccine for a new disease? Who is making that investment? The govt? lol
They ABOLUSTLY do benefit from it, you’re just looking at it as a “less money needs less protection” lens which I highly disagree with. A small artist can have a lot going for them and miss their opportunity because they were stolen. Or they were sampled and never for paid but the person who sampled them got rich. I mean there are dozens of ways to see why this would be a problem. The least of which is, why even make music or movies anymore? If every movie and song ever created can be legally pirated, companies just stop making them.
IP laws help everyone. EVERYONE. Just because companies make money off of them doesn’t make them bad. Just because small creators don’t make a lot of money doesn’t mean they shouldn’t own what they create. Everyone in favor of this just seems to want stuff for free without realizing the impact of that choice, it’s extremely shortsighted.