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.”
They don’t want to delete all IP law, they just want to delete the IP law which is preventing them from postponing the collapse of the AI hype a little bit more.
If they wanted to delete ALL IP Law, I’d move to have my Sonic fanfiction officially published.
Sally Acorn’s back in the canon if I say she is bro!
… Delete… all… IP law?
So… just literally make all piracy legal, switch all gaming and tv show and movie production/consumption… to an optional donation model?
Fuck it, why not.
I am both an avid pirate and have a degree in econ, wrote papers as an undergrad on how to potentially reform the DMCA… and uh yeah, at this point yeah no one has any fucking idea how any thing works, everyone is an idiot, sure fuck it, blow it all up, why not.
Yeah except you know it isn’t going to be that
They’re going to go “yeah but not like that”
They’ll just remove consumer protections and make it so you own even less and if you try to fight it, you’ll have the full weight of the court system to make you poor
Is musk supports it, that’s exactly what he’s hoping will happen. The rich will be able to take advantage of it and the poor will either stay the same or get worse
also jam in there protections for AI training so they don’t have to deal with those pesky rent-seeking “authors”
This, he means abolish IP Law in terms of consumer protections.
Abolish IP for billionaires… not for the poor.
Free for people that already can afford anything.
I mean, I’d like to get rid of IP Law too…
But I actually mean get rid of, not an “Under New Management” sense like Elon The Musky Husky wants
Honestly, I’m a fan of abolishing IP law too, but for some reason I suspect the implementation of that they support is very different than the one I support
I hate agreeing with these assholes, but I do in this case. IP/patent law is explicitly designed to stifle competition. At most, it should last a few years (if you agree with the “recoup the cost of innovation” argument). Innovation will be done for the sake of innovation if there’s competition though. If your opposition innovates and you don’t, you’re going to be destroyed. The exception is when they agree to not compete, which is already illegal though not enforced as strongly as it should be.
IIRC the original US copyright law as written by the founders was 25 years or so. The extensions on that have all been in the last 70 years or so due to mega corps like Disney.
The problem with Musk and Dorsey is that they want the copyright laws to apply to them but no one else. “Rules for thee but not for me” mentality of the wealthy.
Yeah, the problem was not the original copyright law which gave incentive for coming up with new ideas by giving you rights to that idea for long enough that you can be profitable, the problem is that it’s been extended to the point that the people who came up with the idea are long dead and it’s still under copyright for massive corporations.
I hate agreeing with these assholes, but I do in this case.
I guarantee you that neither of these assholes champion any kind of open access to their end works. Elon famously shut down the Twitter API and vexatiously litigated any number of Tesla copycats. Dorsey is only plugging an anti-IP stance because he’s got a new AI engine out and wants to get on board the “Stealing everyone’s DeviantArt library” gravy train. None of it is remotely sincere.
If your opposition innovates and you don’t, you’re going to be destroyed.
That’s simply not true. There are a myriad of historical examples as to it not being true, from the Japanese abolition of the gun during the Meiji Restoration to German telecoms clinging to copper wire data infrastructure despite fiber optics being obviously superior. If you don’t innovate because you have an economic incentive to drag your heels, and your economic clout gives you the ability to close out competitors, then you can do perfectly fine “innovating” in the field of anti-competitive trade behavior rather than real tech innovation.
What we have in Musk and Dorsey are two men who have benefited enormously from Silicon Valley insider investing and cheap borrowing. They don’t give a shit about other people’s IP in the same way Microsoft was more than happy to pillage code and reverse engineer software of its rivals. But if you think they’re going to apply that to their own codebase and personal economic interests… well…
vexatiously
Cool word
This is going to be used corporations to take away everything from individuals who are innovating (more than they already are). Nobody will be able to build wealth off a good idea again. Which if we were in a society where wealth wasn’t required to live a good life I would be okay with, but we aren’t, so I’m not.
Maybe. That’s certainly their intent. I could also see it working the other way though. No more patent trolls or companies hoarding good ideas.
The corporations wouldn’t just hold good ideas under this proposal, they would hold every idea.
Someone innovates and makes a good product? Looks like WalMart is going to produce 100,000 units and sell them at 75% of the innovator’s price, pushing him out.
No matter what, under capitalism, money ALWAYS wins.
Yea, it is a complicated issue, but at least the current way offers the little guys some protection. I’ve posted everything I’ve ever made (not that any of it was all that impressive) freely so it doesn’t really matter to me but for some people it may.
Right? There’s no reason Superman and Winnie The Pooh should fall under ANY copyright, everyone involved with the creation of both ins long dead… The only thing being protected is DC and Disney’s bottom line.
And the fact that Tarzan isn’t public domain is most absurd
Hell it took forever for Sherlock Holmes to be public domain, and the world he was created in doesn’t even remotely exist anymore.
“Delete all IP law” say people who have never created anything of any value to humanity.
Why not get rid of the patent trolls, the monopolies shelving useful technologies through patent loopholes, the … Oh I see the tech billionaires again wanting to uproot a system because loopholes are just too much effort now.
God if every innovation stuck behind patent trolls was suddenly allowed to see the light of day, we’d basically solve the energy crisis overnight… and we’d see games that used the Nemesis System
Of course they are both lying. As with all capitalists, they will always use the law to seize greater power.
i’d also like to delete all billionaires
No! Why would you do that? When you can eat them instead
I don’t want to ingest that many second hand drugs.
This would be disastrous for actual manufacturing because a patent is the only thing that makes it worthwhile to spend a bunch of money upfront to develop a new technology. Unlike with software where you don’t have nearly as much up front capital investment to develop something, it costs millions of dollars to get a manufacturing process up and running and in a good enough state to where it can actually work out financially. Without patents, your competitor can just take all of that work and investment and just copy it with the benefit of doing it right the first time, so they’re able to undercut you on cost. The alternative is that everyone is super secretive about what they’re doing and no knowledge is shared, which is even worse. Patents are an awesome solution to this problem because they are public documents that explain how technologies work, but the law allows a monopoly on that technology for a limited amount of time. I also feel that in the current landscape, copyright is probably also good (although I would prefer it to be more limited) because I don’t want people who are actually coming up with new ideas having to compete with thousands of AI slop copycats ruining the market.
TL;DR- patents are good if you’re actually building things, tech bros are morons who think everything is software.
In the manufacturing space, people are questioning if patents help them at all. There is no stopping China from copying your design and selling it on Aliexpress. In fact, since you’re almost certainly getting your product manufactured in China in the first place, there is no stopping the very manufacturing plant you’re using from producing extras and undercutting you.
Consider this old EEVblog vid about bringing a product to market, and the #1 tip is “don’t bother with a patent”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7BL1O0xCcY
Patents have evolved to be useful to patent trolls. That’s it.
That’s not what Dorsey and Musk are after, though. They want to kill copyright law because it’s inconvenient for AI training data.
Getting rid of IP law basically makes mob tactics the only way to ensure compensation for investment in inventions.
Research is supposed to be publicly funded
Research is supposed to be public benefiting. Private funding just is bad at it.
Okay so at what point does it get handed off to private industry unless the government is just in business with manufacturers in a much more direct way than it is now? We’d need a completely different economic system for all research to be publicly funded. Consider this- often the way it works now is that a government funded researcher discovers a new molecule that could be useful. Then, private companies figure out how to make it industrially and run trials in pilot plants and design the plant to make it at scale. Should the government be doing all of that? This is extremely expensive, and I don’t know how you’d try to prioritize resources in the current economic system.
On the contrary, this is pretty close to what we have right now. Companies don’t like to spend much on R&D once they’re out of the startup phase. A good chunk of that startup phase R&D was actually taking place at a university with public funds. This is especially true of pharmaceuticals. So the answer to the question of “when does it get handed off to private industry?” is to just look at what’s happening already.
The exception is big monopolies. AT&T’s Bell Labs is a legendary R&D department. IBM, Microsoft, and Google all likewise have significant pure R&D going on, and even engineers who don’t like those companies salivate at the opportunity to work in that capacity for them.
But then you’ve got big monopolies on your hands, and that’s a whole other problem.
Patent documents are rarely useful because they’re kept as general and opaque as possible to cover as many innovations as possible. I agree that it’s important to protect manufacturing, but patents are not the right way to go about it for at least two reasons: (1) they block innovation by design (e-ink screens are great examples) and (2) they create a huge barrier to entry for new ideas (think about how many lawyers are making a living on this) I disagree with the senders on so many things. But patents were invented in a world of monarchies and craftsmen. Time to go!
Patents would be fine if the bar for “innovation” would be much higher, software patents weren’t a thing, there was way more research done into prior art, and there would be different (shorter) lengths for patents depending on what industry they target.
Like, if it’s manufacturing or something like drugs where it takes years before you can start making profit, sure, make them 10-20 years. If it’ something you make money off of immediately, it should be shorter.
I actually agree that the patent system could be improved a lot. Not all things are bad about it.
What do you mean with “innovation”? How would that be defined?
Patent documents are rarely useful because they’re kept as general and opaque as possible to cover as many innovations as possible.
I think this is a problem that can be fixed inside of patent system. Make it so by the end of patent life there is “how to build production line of this” manual.
it costs millions of dollars to get a manufacturing process up and running and in a good enough state to where it can actually work out financially. Without patents, your competitor can just take all of that work and investment and just copy it with the benefit of doing it right the first time, so they’re able to undercut you on cost.
This argument makes no sense. Manufacturing lines are built all that time for unpatented products, plus a competitor can’t just “take all of that work and investment”, they will need to put in money to create their own product, even if it’s a copy they still need to make it work, as well as build their own production capacity.
They’ll be second to market, and presumably need to undercut price to get market share… This is a very risky endeavour, unless the profit margins are huge, and in which case, good thing that there’s no patents…
If the research is so costly and complex (pharmaceutical, aeronautical,…), then it should be at least partly funded by the government, through partnerships between universities and companies.
Patents are not a solution.
Manufacturing lines are built all that time for unpatented products,
And cheaply, because the research and productisation has been done by somebody else - this is an argument for patents
plus a competitor can’t just “take all of that work and investment”, they will need to put in money to create their own product,
Not true. One major issue is that many competitors literally copy the product exactly. Fake products wreck the original company
even if it’s a copy they still need to make it work,
That is 100x easier when you have a working product to clone
They’ll be second to market, and presumably need to undercut price to get market share… This is a very risky endeavour, unless the profit margins are huge, and in which case, good thing that there’s no patents…
The point is exactly that the fake product undercuts the original by a huge amount (they had no investment to pay off).
If the research is so costly and complex (pharmaceutical, aeronautical,…), then it should be at least partly funded by the government, through partnerships between universities and companies.
I agree that the government model makes sense for a lot of areas and products. But note that a government won’t invest millions or billions in developing a product if another country immediately fakes the product and prevents the government from collecting back the taxes it spent on the research.
As I discuss above there are lots of criticisms to the current IP laws - adjustment is 1000x better than abolishing a system that has driven research and development for several hundred years
if another country immediately fakes the product and prevents the government from collecting back the taxes it spent on the research
It seems you misunderstand the goal of goverment. Goverment doesn’t care if budget goes down, when quality of life goes up. What is the point of not researching and having bigger budget, if it can’t buy thing that did not get created?
And then on goverment level there is no such thing as copyright or patent. On goverment level laws are not some external condition, but something that changed regularly.
plus a competitor can’t just “take all of that work and investment”, they will need to put in money to create their own product,
Not true. One major issue is that many competitors literally copy the product exactly. Fake products wreck the original company
They STILL need to put in money to create their own product. You know, they can’t magic production lines into existance.
It seems you misunderstand the goal of goverment.
This is your opinion of what you want governments to be, not what they actually are.
What is the point of not researching and having bigger budget, if it can’t buy thing that did not get created?
What a lot of negatives and hypotheticals. All solved by getting a return on investment and having that money to do more things with, including research.
And then on goverment level there is no such thing as copyright or patent.
I’d like to introduce you to the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) which is an intergovernmental organisation that does precisely what you say doesn’t exist.
They STILL need to put in money to create their own product.
Sure, but the cost to duplicate the product is tiny compared to researching, developing then creating a production run for it. And this fake normally severely impacts the profits for the inventor.
But now we’re just repeating the same arguments.
It seems you misunderstand the goal of goverment.
This is your opinion of what you want governments to be, not what they actually are.
I am sorry your country doesn’t try or even claim to be social.
What is the point of not researching and having bigger budget, if it can’t buy thing that did not get created?
What a lot of negatives and hypotheticals. All solved by getting a return on investment and having that money to do more things with, including research.
So in the end money will be spent on research anyway.
And then on goverment level there is no such thing as copyright or patent.
I’d like to introduce you to the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) which is an intergovernmental organisation that does precisely what you say doesn’t exist.
And what next? It can’t stop any goverment from ignoring copyright or patent.
You’re utterly delusional. If this system has done anything is to stiffle small, independent producers and consolidate power in megacorporations.
This is the kind of crap you’re defending: https://patents.justia.com/patent/12268585
This is a random, recent patent from P&G. Read that bullshit, and then tell if if what they’re describing isn’t the most generic design for a diaper or sanitary napkin ever?
“One permeable layer facing the wearer, then a semipermeable layer that tries to only allow liquid to move away from the wearer, then an absorbing layer, then an outer impermeable layer”
Oh boy, if it wasn’t for that patent, I’d be pumping 500 million dollars into building a factory so I can flood the market with my cheap fake products! - said nobody when they read that.
It’s hilarious how far removed from reality your ideal of patents is…
You appear to want to completely burn down a system you don’t understand because of some examples of misuse. For example, as there are slumlords, should we make all property free? Or should we solve the underlying problem (of massive capital flows to the rich?)
You also have no idea how to read and understand a patent. The way they are written is horrendously verbose and highly confusing, but so are medical research papers or legal case summaries, and for the similar reasons: these are highly technical documents that have to follow common law (i.e. a long history of legal decisions taken in IP disputes).
The real problem in the US IMHO has been the constant defunding of the patent office that has allowed a large number of very poor patents to be filed. The problems you are screaming about largely go to that root cause.
But don’t throw the baby out with the bath water - you have no idea how bad that would be for everybody but the mega corporations.
Cool story bro.
Yes, I’m fully aware we want to abolish IP law for different reasons but still, I’m onboard.
Oh no, this is so… good idea. Yarr! Pirate Party approves.
That would be a-m-a-z-i-n-g. Private game servers, fan remakes of shows and movies, I would be over the moon.
Too bad it won’t happen
If they did could we use the Twitter bird or Tesla logo all we wanted? I mean yeah let’s get rid of all IP law but get rid of it for everyone. If we want to copy a big corporation then yeah we should do that. Get rid of copyright and trademarks, woo! Publish all that hidden patented material so anyone can produce it. Let’s get creative. You think big corps will get on board with all this?
I don’t think Elon is that smart to realize what ‘delete all IP laws’ entails. He probably thinks it in the sense of an anarcho-capitalist.
Anarchy for me not for thee.
Delete all internet protocol law
