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Against IP as in if I spend my life creating something you'd be ok with a big company just stealing it and steam rolling me?
Personally, I’d be against corporate owned IP. Leave the IP with the individual artists and writers, who are historically shit on by the large companies. Force the massive companies to actually keep the artists and writers around (and pay them well!) if they want to continue using an IP.
Yes! Now this I can get behind. Companies aren't people!
No, but if we lived in a fantastical star trek society where everyone had the resources they needed to do the things they wanted to do... Yes.
The flip side being the rest of society providing support for you to pursue your lifes work. If it's just you struggling along on your own then you should be able to make sure you're getting paid.
I agree and hope for this. A would were people create to express and no to survive.
Yes, but without IP you can take anything the big company makes for anything you want to do with it.
And they can look at any small business, be it product, art, any book anyone writes, and they can flood the market, crushing you and profiting of the thing you made. Can people not see how this goes both ways and how this would destroy any desire for creation, knowing rich people will just take it and stomp you out immediately?
Imagine you write the next Harry Potter book or some shit, you're catching on and getting popular and now it's gone. A different company is printing your book and you don't get any money. They're making movies off your book and you get nothing. You go to stores and see merch from your book that you wrote that you'll never see a dime of. This is the world you want? Where the rich can easily just take anything with no defense from the creator?
Without IP the company would also get approximately 0 money for selling movies or books. This hypothetical doesn't make sense.
What? They still sell things like merchandise and make money from it. You can make money selling Mickey Mouse hats if you don't own the IP. I feel like you don't understand the situation being presented.
You write a book. I make a copy and sell that exact book because I doesn't exist. I just made money off your book. It's that easy.
Yeah but you can't really profit off of that because anybody can print the book. And if there's no IP, I can just download the book and print it myself. Or read it as a PDF. Or download the IP-free audiobook and listen to that. Even for printed books, competition drives the price to the production costs so very little profit is being made there.
Otherwise big companies would be making big money off of shakespeare and the bible. But that's not how they make their money, they make their money with IP monopolies instead.
You're missing how commerce works. A big company can flood the market. They can use better materials and ship faster due to being entrenched.
Like, hey, you could make an iPhone but will you? You can make a movie too, but will it be as good, you can make merch, but will it be as well designed and distributed?
Even in your example, where anyone can make a copy of the book, what about the author? They could pour years and their heart and soul into a book just to make no money, is that ok?
Big companies make money of Shakespeare and the Bible all the time. I don't know why you would think they don't, they very much do.
You're also mixing monopolies with IP. You can have a monopoly with or without IP.
I write scientific articles for a living and i dont give a fuck about some corporation making money off of them. What I do care is whether people can access my articles in other ways too, that’s why they are on Arxiv and ill email them if somebody asks.
If somebody wants to pay for a printed copy or an Elsevier typeset that doesnt concern me in the slightest. And I dont think it would any other author either if they had a decent income like i do from the uni
I think I found the disconnect between your argument and the other person's. You are not paid as an author, you are paid as an academic or researcher who also writes. Your creation is contractual, like the Disney artist animating the movie and not the author of the fairytale Disney got the idea from.
An author who's income solely comes from their writing having their work stolen by a company like the academic publishing companies do right now would starve in those conditions, and thus have to find other work instead of writing. A UBI or equivalent is required to support an IP-less state.
The scientific journal industry currently acts as if they exist in an IP free world, and take all the profit from other people's work. They then enforce IP on others to monopolize that profit, but in a IP-less world they would still act the same and use their size to capture the lion's share of the market.
I appreciate the comment. Seeing that a system of publishing can work without authors being paid via IP does make a difference. In the short term abolishing IP laws might be bad, but we could replace it with something better, like a UBI, grants for authors, crowdsourcing, and other sources of funding.
And to be clear, we are not living under a UBI. Academics notoriously have to fight over the limited funds that are available to them. Some do need to find other work. Still, nobody is really advocating for an IP-based model. Because it's not better.
This one I don't agree with at all. The journals only exist because they can force people and institutions to pay money to get the articles. They would collapse without IP laws. Their power is already decaying due to Arxiv and sci-hub.
I very much appreciate your input and point of view, it is very enlightening. I will fully admit that academia is notoriously cutthroat for funding and I was definitely not trying to say it even comes close to anything like a UBI, just that the publishing portion is a necessary secondary to the primary job of research. Publishing helps secure grants and funding, and is very important, just not the end-all be-all like a literary author. Holding IP/patents is also still a huge draw/money maker for those at the "top" of academia, and there are plenty who advocate for the current IP-based model because it is their primary form of income. I am not saying this is right or wrong, just that academia is not as altruistic as a whole as you appear to be making it out to be
I am also not sure how you can look at the deals publishers and journals make with colleges to ecosystem lock students with things like portal codes you can only get by buying the textbook/resources new from the school and think that the loss of IP protection would do anything to the publishers besides remove the cost they pay the authors. It's already a scam/racket, and that won't change without legislation making that illegal.
I also believe that scientific discovery from research universities and any institution getting Federal or State funding should be public domain anyway, both because we the people are paying for it (all or in part), and there is a vested interest in furthering mankind through scientific knowledge and achievement. This is different than entertainment, and even philosophy to a degree.
I think we need to do away with our current system of social support/welfare systems and implement a UBI to offset automation and the changing economy anyway so 100% on board there, and grants for the arts would be great. Crowdsourcing would also be great, and universal healthcare would allow crowd funding to pivot from medical bankruptcy prevention to the intended use of financing creators. I just don't see IP abolition working without major steps into post-scarcity first.
I mean they do say publish or perish. But technically you are correct. And there are some teaching-heavy jobs too. Also I don't really care about the people who are at the top of academia.
Absolutely no idea what you're talking about. I guess it depends on the country. Here, a lot of students pirate their books anyway. Personally, I didn't buy a single book during my bachelors/masters.
EDIT: but I think we're getting two things confused here, journal publishing and books. Journal articles and conference proceedings is the thing I wanted to concentrate on because that is the weird edge case where the standard IP / author compensation approach doesn't apply.
Books within academia work mostly in a similar way to other book publishing, and of course people who are currently making money out of that don't want that to stop. Which doesn't mean they'd be worse off without IP based publishing in books in the long term either.
I am glad this practice apparently isn't universal. Basically the idea is that because pirating books is possible and they don't get paid again for used books, the publishers have created DRM through the use of web portals that are required to turn in assignments and in some cases even tests. Access to these is provided with a new copy of their books in the school book store, or for the same/more price as the book sold separately. Without the portal, you cannot pass the class because they lobbied the school to make it illegal for teachers to accept your work any other way. The school gets a kickback from the publisher and they both make tons of money
Sounds uniquely american. Is it?
How can you steal something that you can't own?
Say you write a book.
A big company can take that book, print it and sell it without you seeing a dime. Then they can sell merch and make movies off your book without you seeing a dime.
It's pretty obvious, but people think IP only protects companies for some reason
IP only protects those who have the means to defend their IP in court, which is rich people and companies.
Sure. I don't think that is theft.
As a consumer, you can download the book, listen to a free audiobook, or print it yourself if you want to. The company only gets money if they somehow make better physical version than what others have access to.
To me this is not at all akin to ownership or theft.
False. This shows a lack of knowledge around the topic. Off the top of my head I know a specific case where a small grocery store defended it's IP from Apple. In your world that wouldn't work. I mean how did JK Rowling go from a poor person with a story to a rich author. She had no money to defend her IP.
This take is just wrong. Factually.
So if you create a book or song or art piece, you shouldn't be entitled to the money that those make? They should just all be free? I mean sure, but then people will stop doing it, because of it doesn't make money people need to work to pay bills, they can't create.
The first example was a company, and the second example I assume was done under a book deal, so a company.
Good night
this is always how people respond to anti-IP sentiment. i’m actually glad OP was specific enough to not just say copyright and expand his condemnation to IP generally. i agree with the OP that IP is such a brazen violation of nature as to be sinful, and im not really religious.
in what world does your strawman argument here exist? bc it certainly isn’t this one. don’t believe their noble lies that IP and copyright legislation is somehow good for artists. people now, with copyright, are literally “steamrolled” just the same way you suggest in your hypothetical. all those people making fan art and media through no small commitment of their time are forced into a black market because it is literally illegal to draw and sell mickey mouse. but i suppose that isn’t “real” art and doesn’t “deserve” to be protected by the law the same way? dude get your head out of your ass. do you not see how illogical the entire premise is? this is an assault on you and your peers. it’s quite literally fascist at best. and no this isn’t some woke fucking rambling. this is a real tool of oppression used against us that is so well-honed people like yourself beg for the boot.
It doesn't exist? I can write a book and someone can steal it. I can develop a product, shark tank style, and just have a big company steal it.
The fact that you think someone should be able to write a book or make art and not own it is crazy to me. That's just letting rich people own everything because the have enough money to stomp you out.
no. my point is that the world we live in now is the one you are describing. if rich people are the only ones able to afford litigation to support their copyright, then it might as well only exist for them. they do own everything, with the way things currently work.
the solution is, yes, crazily enough not attaching an arbitrary monetary value to information that is fundamentally free to produce and distribute.
you’re brainwashed, man.
I'm brain washed? Lol, ok, since you want to make this about the people in the argument and not the topic itself fine, but it's still worth pointing out how you're wrong.
You came across as an I'm 13, and this is a deep post. I get it. You hate rich people; we all do, but you clearly have no idea how IP laws work, thinking it's just the guy with the most money running around stealing stuff lol. You have some fantasy in your head where if we open everything up it'll be all better. Ignoring the reality of how laws and lobbying worry, ignoring how patents work, ignoring how you don't need millions to fight an IP case. I mean how did every famous author make money? They owned their own works. You are sorely misinformed about a topic you have more feelings about than facts.
This is %100 not the case. Small mom and pop grocery stores have won cases against Apple. You're just making stuff up, and I'm brainwashed? lol
No. Fully no. There are tons of authors, artists, and inventors who have made money off their inventions. You live in some other reality where no one owns anything right now. What you're saying is they shouldn't have the sole rights to what they create, you want it to be even EASIER for the rich to take. Because right now, despite what your angsty self might think, that's not how it's happening. And what do we get? Oh, I can make my own iPhone now, wow, yah, I'll get right on that.
You are fighting FOR the rich at this point.
You need to take a breath, educate yourself, and speak on the topic once you know it better instead of ranting about how you feel and think it should be, all from a place of ignorance.
Maybe the problem is the existence of big companies then. IP didn't exist as an idea until the 19th century, and humanity made plenty of progress between that and hunting-gathering.
It existed as more than an idea in the late 1800s, because it is referenced in the US Constitution in 1787.
It looks like the concept was established earlier:
Intellectual Property
IP are things you create, art, books, stories. A person should own the book they write...