Monetary monopolies centralizes power and wealth.
Intellectual Property legislation blocks the decentralizing effect of ideas.
Both policies corrupt society at high speed.
The freerider problem demotivates people to play for freedom.
Result:
Easy play for people who seek power.
How do you solve this enigma?
Little by little (in our own small way) - as we encourage and guide various communities towards embracing and adopting decentralized, disruptive and innovative protocols, technologies and platforms; there is an abundance of both hope and value for value indications that more and more are beginning to understand that, the current system we’ve all grown up in, cannot be changed from within. Many who see the light and posses the resilience of low time preference within the ecosystem of a new paradigm will make the shift and once they see what’s on the other side, they are never going back to a system that steals their time, talent, joy, creativity, capabilities, worth, and money - to continue strengthening it against their own self interest. It may not appear to us to be happening as fast as the human eye can see and conceptualize but it’s happening much faster than we think. Little by little. 🫂
What people regularly dismiss with intellectual property legislation is that it actually promotes innovation and the spreading of ideas.
Patent laws provide a strong incentive to publish ideas instead of hiding or obscuring them. This provides a wealth of information for everyone, boosts competition early on before market penetration is too big, and incentivises faster development.
I see this every day.
Gaslighting.
It has never been proven, empirically or logically, that IP is net beneficial for society.
Actually, logics dictate that it's very harmful.
How could one ever prove that? And why should logics dictate its harmfulness? I am missing that logic obviously.
IP protection enforcement shifts the power towards the larger lawyer armies, yes.
However, in terms of spreading ideas and accelerating competitive R&D, patents were clearly beneficial in mutliple cases in my experience. Both as inventor and utlilizing the large corpus of patents to generate new ideas.
And on a longer time horizon the ideas become public good, when the patents expire.
Man acts purposefully, to improve his situation. He doesn't need to be rewarded with a privilege. He fucks around and finds out, and copies other good ideas and behevior automatically. He does it alone and together with others. One man's creativity inspires others. When it happens it feels like magic. Very little gives a dopamin rush like understanding something new. And when to people's ideas melt and turn into a third idea, the magic and dopamin is almost overwhelming. This is why dopamin often is referred to as "the learning hormone."
IP, on the other hand, is nothing but government fiat.
It's sold with a promise that a nothingness consisting of government fiat can produce something we call material wealth.
Government doesn't even attempt to prove its case.
And it rarely ever talks about the costs of blocking free dissemination of ideas.
Only when government profits from talking about it, as the US govt did in the 19th century, they mention it.
If you think otherwise, prove me wrong.
Show me how government fiat creates something from nothing, and explain to me why the cost of fiat is less than the profit.
And show me how IP distributes wealth fairly.
If you don't make any attempt to do this, we're finished talking about IP.
I thought a lot about this during the past few days and it seems to me that we were talking about different things.
I was talking about the spreading of ideas and not the distribution of wealth or power.
And I still think that publishing patents accellerates the global distribution of ideas compared to companies not having this incentive to publish. In most cases it has nothing to do with dopamine but is a rational business decision.
Anyway, thanks for the discussion and sharing your thoughts.
I recall this article that made me think wow a few years back on how copyright sabotages the availability of works:
Thx, yes as expected
