I think he’s saying ideas aren’t property
Discussion
Truly innovative ideas I believe are the productive property of the inventor. A balance needs to be struck between patents and IP, royalties to the creator, and then eventually becoming public property. Without a balance, inventors will obfuscate true inventions and the ideas will die with them.
What kind of ideas will die with them?
Seems like more likely the ideas wouldn’t be had in the first place.
Look into the origins of the journeyman system in German. It is a very real problem when you have no protection for ideas or techniques that they are lost when the inventor dies
Somehow I did and missed what you mean. Can you share an example?
The journeyman system was created to share trade secrets in skilled trades like carpentry, masonry, architecture, ect. A master would train an apprentice with "secret" knowledge with the agreement that the apprentice would leave the town and not compete against the master becoming a journeyman: literally leaving (going on a journey) to then establish a business elsewhere. Without this system the masters would horde knowledge for a business advantage and die without sharing the advanced techniques
This sounds like an argument against the idea of intellectual property, right? These guys were just protecting their innovations. What am I missing? Believing IP is real property or not wouldn’t result in them sharing their trade secrets would they?
The journeyman system is basically a location based non-compete agreement. It protects the competitive business advantage of the master and gives him the confidence to share knowledge without his apprentice eroding his profits
How would a society enforcing idea-ownership solved this problem?
That's what the patent system does, it is meant to reward the creators with royalties or a temporary monopoly on production
Hmm, I believe patents aren’t used for trade secrets like the above example for exactly that reason. They are only used when there is a likelihood that people are going to figure it out the secret in the process of making money on it. If obfuscation is possible, it works better than patents.
The open source world kinda suggests the opposite. I think people generally want to be understood & want to be recognized for their contributions.
It's mostly scammers claiming to be working on getting patents (having actually invented nothing) that work to obfuscate how things work.
And there is a whole industry currently built around buying patents simply to attack innovators.
Crowd funding (especially with zaps & zap splits) seems potentially useful for directly rewarding innovators. Though maybe it needs to be done via liquid or some sidechain/spiderchain that allows some sort of escrow or something in the event that an idea does turn out to be a scam, assuming it's necessary to conceal details until a certain amount is committed.
If their are no trademarks or ways to register intellectual property how could you prove it is fraud... maybe the person experienced the exact sequence of ideas as Lyn and wrote them down? If ideas are not subject to rivalry as you claim this would be perfectly acceptable
There are lots of ways to prove when you came up with or created a thing. That still doesn't prove you deserve any sort of reward, I have a thousand ideas for how to improve things, but until I implement some of them & produce something of value no one owes me anything. No one owes me a share of their work if they create something I thought of first.
You're a car guy... have you seen the movie Flash of Genius? It's about the inventor of the intermittent windshield wiper and his decade long battle with Ford MoCo. If inventors cannot claim ownership of their inventions what stops large corps from steamrolling independent creators and leaving them pennyless
I don't know the details of that particular conflict, but notice how that story sells well enough to justify a multi-million dollar movie budget.
I don't think anyone is necessarily owed anything for an idea that they themselves can't implement. But it would make sense for companies to recognize & reward people who invent useful things. If someone can prove they were wronged by a large company people love to hate big companies in favor of some little guy. Making it easier to produce & sell components for cars & appliances would make it easier for people to independently get the sort of reward & recognition they deserve. Govt obstacles are the primary problem, more govt control & intervention really isn't the solution.
I’m not sure what you’re saying.
There is no IP on sammiches but people keep making them and make $$. If you’re productive for people they will demand/ask for your good or service.
And “IP” also introduces the corrupt arbiter. We have even seen this corruption with cancer treatments and other great solutions for the people. The empowered (and unelected) arbiters usually protect the people that currently fill their pockets.
Obviously sandwiches are in the public domain of knowledge, but something like advanced silicon chip manufacturing is not yet. To incentivise advancements in capital intensive and important areas like this you need to reward investors for their ideas.
Not arguing that the system is not ripe for corruption (it is run by humans), just that certain innovative ideas are a person's intellectual property for a certain period of time.
*inventors not investors
Well, we disagree. I would still pay someone who makes the chip. No reason to pay them extra to prevent others from making it.
You miss the point... without IP protections noone will be incentivised to invest in the capital to discover the innovations that make that chip possible
I don’t think I do… people invent things without preventing others from doing that thing all the time.
We disagree and it’s okay!
You’re a spicy one.
People respond to incentives, remove those incentives and you will get vastly different outcomes. If you don't protect true innovators you will not get the progress that we all desire
The open source world tends to move much faster than proprietary. I think reality demonstrates exactly the opposite of what you claim would happen.
There’s actually shockingly little evidence to support the claim that intellectual property rights increase innovation. Check the book Against Intellectual Monopolies if you want to be informed on the subject. Given the enormous, burdensome, and corruptible state apparatus required to enforce IP, it seems like the burden of proof should be on your side to support your claims.
Also, the incentive argument doesn’t really make sense. The IP framework is a type of all-pay auction, and those tend to generate losses for the participants.
Patent holders ≠ innovators necessarily
Yeah I think this is a good point. We should expect behavior to be different. Burning problems will still be solved, but sure some marginal ones won’t be. That might be worth the freedom that a no IP world would enjoy. And that world might even be better off in other ways.
Also, people do work for fame and glory in addition to money, and those other two ain’t going anywhere
See my point about stealing Lyn Alden's book... you would not only be stealing the profits from book sales but also be stealing the clout and public prestige from conceiving those new ideas.
People respond to incentives... take away the incentives to invent and you will get less inventions. Running research and development in the 21st century is unbelievable expensive and IP and royalties is how these ventures get funded; thinking it will happen anyway if you allow blatant plagiarism and theft of intellectual property if sophomoric at best.
Why do you keep reverting back to this position in your argument after I have addressed it multiple times?
And R&D is cheaper & easier now than it has ever been. 3d printers are a couple hundred dollars & modeling software is free. It used to require ~$100k machine to rifle a barrel, & twitter 3d printed gun people figured out how to do it perfectly with a few hundred dollars worth of equipment.
Because you ceded the point that intellectual property is real... plagiarism is bad remember... Plagiarism is the theft of another's ideas: their intellectual property.
America alone spent $792 Billion on research and development in 2022 ( https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsf23320 ). Just because a few open source software programs exist doesn't make all research and innovation cheap
No, you are just dead set on twisting what I said to fit your position so that you don't have to change your mind or see the distinction I made.
You call yourself an Agorist but you reason like an average Communist: believing it is perfectly acceptable to laying claim to others intellectual work and feeling entitled to their property
If you find a recipe do you feel the need to ask permission to use it?
If I figure out how something works it gets added to my knowledge of how to do things & I don't believe anyone has any right to tell anyone else how they can or can't arrange their own property. Food is not different from metal or wood or anything else
IP is a violation of physical property rights. If everything is patented then your ownership of materials would be meaningless. You couldn't make anything with your own stuff without buying permission from a bunch of other people. So the scam is made more believable by creating completely arbitrary time constraints. But it's entirely based on an ends justifying the means sort of argument. "We get to beat you up for using your property a certain way for a certain amount of time because someone needs to be rewarded for this idea." And even independent arrival at an already patented idea doesn't free you from the scam.
The very purpose of property rights is to establish a fair & just way to reduce conflict over scarce & rivalrous things.
The entire basis for the IP scam requires one to confuse copying with stealing in order to create conflict where there otherwise would be none. And that's why I said, if nothing is missing, nothing was stolen.
I'm sure your stance of no intellectual property extends to trademarks as well. What if someone starts producing "Coca Cola" in their garage and includes antifreeze as one of the ingredients? Do you think the actual Coca Cola company has a right to stop them? It will surely kill anyone who drinks it, and it would greatly erode the brand value of Coca Cola causing them to lose substantial amounts of revenue. Or would Coca Cola company be considered "an angry fucking 5 year old scammer" in your eyes?
No, as I said before that is lying (or fraud).
Saying you are someone you aren't, or taking credit for something you didn't do isn't okay.
Physically harming people is a punishable offense & harming people with the intent of also damaging a business is worse.
People need ways to clearly identify & distinguish themselves from others. But I do not believe force funded institutions should exist at all, so I think we are going to need decentralized methods for simple & easily authentication.
So trademarks and branding are 100% intellectual property. They obviously serve a valuable purpose and a company is absolutely within their rights to defend that property. I'm glad we agree.
Also:
Merriam-Webster dictionary, Plagiarism:
(transitive verb): to steal and pass off the ideas or words of another as one's own : use another's production without crediting the source.
(Intransitive verb) : to commit literary theft : present as new and original an idea or product derived from an existing source
Plagiarism is a violation of intellectual property, you can not choose to believe in one without the other, that's asinine.
I think you should read what I said more carefully.
If you can figure out how to defend exclusive control of a particular brand name without using force or violence then I'm all for that.
I think it is fraud to claim to be the originator of a book that was simply copied from someone else. I see nothing wrong with reprinting a copy of a book that is properly attributed to the author & indicating that it was an independent publication (same as any book in the public domain). I also think it is a fraud to produce a copied product & claim it is a respected brand. But there is nothing wrong with Aldidas & Adidas coexisting. I don't know what sort of restitution is owed for violations in either case, I suspect something like libel laws would be the place to look for how restitution should be handled.
Sure... How many hundreds of billions of that is govt & pharam corp corruption?
If R&D is cheaper now than it has ever been for the average person then it is for everyone no matter what sort of BS fiat numbers someone puts up.
I didn't think I would have to defend the basic idea that theft of private property is bad on Nostr... especially with someone who says they have an agorist view point. So to summarize: 1. Intellectual Property is real and has value. 2. Theft is wrong. 3. Stealing another person's property violates the concepts of a free market and leads to bad outcomes.
I thought this place was built on the concept of "value 4 value"? What are we trading on Nostr if not Intellectual Property for money?
Lol you are on open source nostr rn.
Why don’t you try repeating lyn Alden’s posts word for word and see how many zaps and follows/unfollows you get vs her.
If people who want to prevent others from producing can’t do it, maybe they’ll go make sammiches or do something else productive.
If I take pictures of your car & then can go home & feed them into a machine that will "print" me a car eith my materials & electricity as inputs, have I stolen your car? Have I stolen a car from the manufacturer? Is anyone missing anything? Would they even know I had done this?
People confuse copying with stealing, but they are very different things. Theft is subtraction. Copying is addition.
You in particular keep trying to confuse lying with copying, which is also a very different thing.
We are surrounded by low cost ways to copy everything we see. The internet is a giant, nearly free, copy machine.
Property is scarce & rivalrous. Things that are not rivalrous cannot be property.
If you are actually interested in understanding the issue, Stephan Kinsella is an IP lawyer with lots of great video & audio content on the subject.
Except that people who have some problem they really want solved are usually willing to spend money to figure out how to solve it.
Driving investment money toward the pursuit of payouts from monopoly production rights actually allows people to sit on better ideas for decades, or worse to plan out propaganda campaigns to get a product with an expiring patent choked off the market while they roll out the newly patented product.
I'm pretty sure expiring patents on refrigerants were the entire source of the "CFCs damaging the ozone" campaign which as far as I can tell was all just total BS. The ozone layer is 15 miles above all weather & CFCs are significantly heavier than air. They just needed some way to ban competitors from making cheap CFCs while they rolled out CFHCs.
I don't think the IP system protects inventors at all. It takes a long time & easily costs tens of thousands of dollars to get a patent & you face legal threats from massive companies in the process. Most inventors have to work salaried jobs for mega corps who ultimately own all of their inventions.
A system where anyone who invented anything was free to start a business & produce it without having to pay for permission to do so, or to seek legal protection for the use of their own ideas would be a system that was good for individual inventors. IP effectively does the opposite of that.
The patent system is horribly corrupt and gamed by large interests, not arguing that it is a functioning system what so ever. I'm arguing that certain innovative ideas are the property of their creators for a limited number of years.
Based on what non-arbitrary principle? It seems you can't even argue a specific timeframe.
You said... IP is a scam. I said innovators should be able to lay claim to their innovations. I think they should for a period of time, but not infinite time. Your saying my reasoning is flawed because I didn't specify the exact length of time?
I'm saying that there is no valid principle to support your position.
By being an innovator you naturally get the first crack at doing something no one else can do yet. How does that grant you the extra right to send thugs out to attack anyone who copies what you are doing?
Persuasion is a perfectly acceptable way to attempt to get consumers to support you above others, but violence isn't.
Anyone claiming they have the right to beat people up for copying them (like an angry fucking 5 year old) is a scammer.
I'm sure your stance of no intellectual property extends to trademarks as well. What if someone starts producing "Coca Cola" in their garage and includes antifreeze as one of the ingredients? Do you think the actual Coca Cola company has a right to stop them? It will surely kill anyone who drinks it, and it would greatly erode the brand value of Coca Cola causing them to lose substantial amounts of revenue. Or would Coca Cola company be considered "an angry fucking 5 year old scammer" in your eyes?
No different than when people claimed bitcoin cash was bitcoin, it's buyer beware + plus improved education.
If a company is killing people while also commiting the fraud of claiming to be another company in an act of defamation, then they are guilty of a great many crimes, for which they should be pursued, & IP is irrelevant.
IP is relevant when a competitor produces a cola product for less money & Coke wants to attack them. In that case I think Coke would be in the wrong.
trademarks are not the same as copyright. they are protection against counterfeiting.
You also said, "nothing missing = nothing stolen" . I would disagree with this as well. In my previous example of stealing Lyn Alden's book and claiming it as someones own work; they would be stealing the profits from her book sells and the prestige and social clout of publishing new and innovative ideas. They can definitely cause harm by fraudulently claiming others innovative ideas.
Ownership, as a concept, applies to scarce (rivalrous) things. Ideas are not scarce (rivalrous).