
Our Intellectual Property Laws Are Out of Control (2013) - smitty1e
https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/gadgets/a8937/our-intellectual-property-laws-are-out-of-control-15467970/
======
Thorentis
The first step in dealing with these issues, is to have a serious discussion
about the term "intellectual property", and whether or not an idea can indeed
be "property".

I think a very large part of the problem, is that our society has somehow come
to the conclusion that yes, they can be. I strongly disagree. I think a better
way to look at IP, is as an "intellectual lease".

When you have an idea, as the person or group who originally conceived of it,
you are presumably in the best position to make use of it. You can therefore
"lease" from society, the right to use it exclusively for a short, well
defined period of time. At the end of that term, your lease expires.

At no point do you "own" the idea, because as soon as you release it into the
world, it is already in the minds of many, some of which may be able to put it
to better use than you, or to improve it faster than you.

This has several ramifications, including ones that effect creative works too.
I posted a few long comments recently about copyright that expresses my view,
but to summarise - creative works should have a limited window during which
the author or creator can be the exclusive seller of the work (eg copyright
should be about restricting who can profit, rather than who can copy). After
that time, anybody is free to sell as well. This has many benefits. I used
Harry Potter as the example last time as it is well know. Harry Potter now is
known by almost everybody. We all know the story, we know the characters. JK
has made a ton of money - more money imo, than any one author deserves, but
that aside. HP is part of our collective humans story now. If I want to make a
mobile game about it, or write a play about it, or adapt it for a new medium,
or translate it - why should I still owe the original author royalties when I
could reproduce the plot from memory? Again, I use the example of ancient
Greece, and the way in which aural story telling was paranount. Stories
spread, adapted, becamr part of society. The ones that survived that we have
written down are simply one version that would have been told aurally at one
point in time. The way that we insist that works and derivative works be set
in stone in order to maintain profit is prioritising profit over the joy that
is the spreading and adapting of stories that has been central to most human
cultures since the beginning.

~~~
unishark
> At no point do you "own" the idea, because as soon as you release it into
> the world, it is already in the minds of many, some of which may be able to
> put it to better use than you, or to improve it faster than you.

When it comes to patents, even if you don't share the idea, others will come
up with it independently. And the patent system is perfectly fine if you
patent something then sit on the idea for 20 years and never allow it or any
derived products be made or used.

~~~
mschuster91
> And the patent system is perfectly fine if you patent something then sit on
> the idea for 20 years and never allow it or any derived products be made or
> used.

This should be banned either way by mandatory licensing requirements under
FRAND terms as part of the patent grant, especially if the holder does not
actively use the patent.

Too much progress in society/technology is blocked because companies are
sitting on patents and not licensing them.

------
chadash
The system as we know it needs to be overhauled. We need to scrap everything
and then think carefully about what should be patentable with the goal being a
system that’s good for society. Drugs that cost $1B to bring to market? Seems
like they should get some kind of exclusive period though we can argue over
what that period of time should be. Software? Nope. Keep copyright law for
that, but even there, drastically reduce the copyright period.

~~~
beefield
I think both patents and cooyright should be taxed so that the time
progressivity is high. Say first year or two practically free, but if you want
to keep your ip at 20 years, it should cost you billions. You can stop paying
tax any time you want and your ip moves automatically to public domain. Solves
also orphan works. (Yes, I know, Berne convention needs likely to be amended
for this to be possible)

~~~
chii
or treat intellectual property the same as physical property - pay a property
tax. The value of the IP is the amount of transfers and licensing it has - so
you cannot hide profit by "selling" IP from a foreign offshore tax haven.

~~~
mreome
I think the value of most IP is to abstract to apply a tax to it. Some patents
are extremely valuable, most are worthless. Some are only useful to Patent
Trolls, or for defensive purposes, etc.

How would you tax a company that patents something it develops and sells
itself? If the products/service they sell involves lots of non-patented
features and/or multiple patented features, how do you determine the value of
any individual patent?

How do you determine the value of patents effectively licensed through an
Agreement Not-to-Sue?

~~~
est31
You raise a good point. The way how real estate is valued is through a market
where each item is looked at individually more or less, but patents are
connected.

A possible solution could involve letting the patent owner itself state how
valuable owning the patent is to them. They could declare a monetary number X
and then do annual payments of say 0.1% of that number. They could adjust the
number monthly by statement to the patent office, but would have to pay the
tax on the maximum number they told to the patent office within each year. Now
comes the core of the idea: the number would be public, and any entity could
"free" the patent by paying that amount X to the patent office which then
redirects it to the patent's owners after deducting a tax. The patent would
then enter the public domain.

So company A invents something, patents it, and claims a billion dollars of
value to the patent office. They have to pay a million in taxes annually.
Company B thinks it could make a lot more than a billion dollars if the patent
got lifted, and pays 1 billion to get rid of the patent. Company A is now 1
billion richer (minus patent freedom taxes), but now has to deal with
competitors. So their next patent will have 10 billion as value number.

I'm not sure the idea is good or not, it has some problems, e.g. it might lead
to patents becoming even larger than they are today so that they get lots of
valuable stuff into the patent's umbrella. Patent offices might become more
willing to grant patents for things as they are now a major revenue source for
the government, and many patents on promising stuff will need big investors so
that they can afford the taxes until the patent matures. Also companies won't
be able to plan as well as they are now. Making the tax progressive will help
with some of these problems, but maybe not enough and maybe not with all of
them.

~~~
mreome
This is an interesting idea. It reminds me of the idea of _" I’ll break the
cookie in two; you choose your piece."_ I’d have to work through the
implications of how this would play out between large corporations, but the
most immediate issue I would see with it is for the smallest
inventors/companies.

In many industries, a new/small company would never be able to price it’s
patents out of the reach of its largest competitors, it would put them in the
position of either spending huge amounts of their working capital in taxes to
defend their patents, or let the patents be sold and compete with their large
competitors on production, logistic, and support costs (which is a loosing
position for a new small/new company).

It would be even worse in the case of a solo inventor. Imagine you come up
with an idea so good it’s clearly worth a billion dollars, but only in an
industry with a single, or small number, of big players. If that one big
player, or several big players collectively, refuse to buy or license your
patent, you won’t be able to afford the taxes and end up with nothing once it
expires (and they are free to use it). If you want to try to develop it
yourself, you now need to find a huge amount of additional investment just to
cover the taxes.

~~~
chii
> the case of a solo inventor.

does this actually happen in practise?

If the invention is clearly worth billions (that is, either it is capable of
generating billions in value, or save costs of billions in value), then why
wouldn't the big players license it?

If these big players openly collude (via contractual agreements for example),
then it sounds illegal (or should be).

If these players aren't colluding per se, but "individually" decide to not
purchase a license, then the first player that buys the license gets a head-
start in their savings/rewards from using the patent.

------
kiba
Patent holders and genuine inventors can and will hold the development of
technology back.

Just look at the 3D printing market and its thriving ecosystem after the
patent on FDM printing expired.

It is the open source community that's innovating, not the bigwig that started
3D printing in the first place.

~~~
lopmotr
There's obviously a balance to be made with incentivizing inventing though.
Some inventions are expensive and nobody would do them without patent
protection. Some are trivial though and it's those that are a problem.

Perhaps whether you can get a patent should depend on how much time has passed
from when the invention was possible (existence of necessary prior
inventions/science/etc.) and when you invented it. If nobody else thought of
it for 10 years, maybe it's worth a patent but if it's an immediate
consequence of something else, then perhaps it's obvious and deserves no
protection.

~~~
TheDong
I question that it's obvious that we need to incentivize inventing through any
form of IP law.

Let's look at software. Some of the most notable pieces of software, from
postgres, to linux, to redis, are available under open source copyright
license. Those licenses are intentionally waiving copyright law.

Inventions of those pieces of software happened with no expectation of IP.

Let's look at academic research: research institutes and academic institutes
are more interested in getting published, advancing the arts, and improving
their own name in the field than they are with patents. A large chunk of
ground-breaking research done in academia or research-labs is done with the
primary goal of getting a paper published out of it, and whether there's a
patent or not, it's not what motivated the research. Often, there is no
patent.

In fact, I think the open source software movement is the most obvious example
of what happens when you don't have IP. The whole point of open source
licenses is to defang copyright law (to use copyright law against itself). In
the case of the Apache2 license, it also gives up patent rights. Within the
open source software movement, innovation and profit are both common. Both
happen in spite of the lack of IP protection.

Why is that the case? Well, software developers who create great things and
release it into the open source world often want to increase their talents,
increase their recognition, or solve a problem they or others are facing.
Those motivations all exist even without IP nor profit motives. Some of them
do have a profit motive and create open source software in order to be hired
or in order to sell support (or for some other more complex funding model).
Those also don't need IP laws to help them.

I admit, software is interesting. It can be argued to be an art in many ways,
and it's much easier to accept that artists will continue producing art, even
without financial or IP benefits.

However, I think that it's likely other fields where this holds as well. I
think that someone who has an idea to improve a part of a car will still wish
to publish the idea to gain recognition, or negotiate with an auto company to
try and implement the idea to gain both fortune and fame. I think the drug
companies will still wish to produce and sell drugs, and their research
employees will still attempt to find new and better drugs, even with the only
motive being commercial profit, not IP + commercial profit.

I think software provides ample evidence that you can profit off something
even when IP is not in play. That the original inventor has enough of a
headstart.

~~~
kiba
The argument is that this doesn't apply to innovation that are expensive.

However, I already pointed out that 3D printer are more expensive to develop
due to involvement of physical objects rather than just writing line of codes.

In any case, governments are perfectly capable of funding big expensive
projects should we wish them to do so.

~~~
mreome
It's difficult to get the general public to support taxes that will fund the
repair of degrading bridges, leaking dams, and cracked roadways that may soon
fail and actually KILL them. Do you honestly believe you’ll find widespread
support for government funding of all major industry research?

Also, how does that investment get prioritized? What if the general public
decides that some industry isn't worth investment, despite some people
believing it is? Without patents, there is no way for the private sector to
invest in R&D without just knowingly burning money.

I'm not saying government investment in research isn't a good idea. I think it
is, and is something we should be doing more of, but it's not a replacement
for patents.

~~~
Jetrel
Honestly, our general public really hasn't had any direct say in how our tax
dollars are spent for most of America's history. Outside of really rare
individual referendums, the public doesn't sit down and decide on individual
taxes like bridge repair/etc. We're not a democracy; we're a republic.

If you look at polling, virtually everybody in our country would be in favor
of repairing bridges/etc. Furthermore, both political parties in every major
election for the past few decades have explicitly promised to enact massive
funding for exactly this. Ergo - we're all voting in favor of major
infrastructure funding - i.e. voting "yes, please, tax me and pay for bridge
repair. Do it." The public will is absolutely behind this.

Our real problem is we're terrible judges of character - we elected people who
just pocketed the money, instead.

Oops.

------
jbotz
Popular Mechanics has been popularizing science and technology and promoting
inventions for over 100 years. For them to publish an article that comes down
so firmly against the current intellectual property laws is significant. It's
time for change.

~~~
phreack
You're right, but also the article is over 7 years old. It's been time for
change for a long time.

------
smitty1e
Glenn Harlan Reynolds (born August 27, 1960) is Beauchamp Brogan Distinguished
Professor of Law at the University of Tennessee College of Law, and is known
for his American politics weblog, Instapundit.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glenn_Reynolds](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glenn_Reynolds)

------
LatteLazy
Many people don't know that fashion have very very limited IP protection. It
remains one of the most innovative and changeable sectors of the economy...

------
neilwilson
Why our current system needs IP?

Because it is collateral for loans - which is the system we use via Interest
Rate targeting to inject money into circulation.

Banking systems from the physical industrial era worked by discounting
physical assets. You built a car and then discounted that asset at the bank to
build more cars.

That model doesn’t scale with ideas and services. Unless you have something
that makes ideas and services behave like physical assets.

If we moved to a system where we discounted time instead (ie you can always
sell your 8 hours of labour power) then we wouldn’t need to fund creativity by
bank lending.

------
vegetablepotpie
When the group of people who are supposed to be protected by a law say it’s
not helpful and the group that enacts the law says it’s for their own good, it
says a lot about the law and who it is really benefiting.

~~~
pmiller2
Whether a law or policy gets enacted at the federal level has essentially zero
correlation with public opinion, in general:
[https://act.represent.us/sign/the-problem](https://act.represent.us/sign/the-
problem)

~~~
yesenadam
Thanks, very interesting. I found their "what the public wants has no impact"
hard to believe – well, they have about 4 differently-worded versions of that
on that page – so I tried to read the first paper cited,

> Gilens and Page, _Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest
> Groups, and Average Citizens_ , Perspective on Politics, 2014.
> [http://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/fil...](http://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/files/gilens_and_page_2014_-testing_theories_of_american_politics.doc.pdf)

In which Figure 1 is the flat graph in the video, showing that about 30% of
policies are adopted no matter what percentage of 'average citizens' favor
them. For 'average citizen' (what on that webpage they call "the public" and
"public opinion") they seem to consider only opinions of the median-income
percentile (i.e. 1% of people):

> Policy preferences at the fiftieth income percentile — that is, the
> preferences of the median-income survey respondent—work quite well as
> measures of the preferences of the average citizen

Also it finds a correlation of 0.78 between the preferences of this percentile
and that of "economic elites", yet a -0.1 negative correlation between
economic elites and business interest groups, which is surprising.

This seems to me to contradict the "no impact" finding:

> Thus when popular majorities favor the status quo, opposing a given policy
> change, they are likely to get their way; but when a majority—even a very
> large majority—of the public favors change, it is not likely to get what it
> wants. In our 1,779 policy cases, narrow pro-change majorities of the public
> got the policy changes they wanted only about 30 percent of the time. More
> strikingly, even overwhelmingly large pro-change majorities, with 80 percent
> of the public favoring a policy change, got that change only about 43
> percent of the time.

How is that "no impact"? Anywhow, it's an interesting study, I'd love to read
what someone who knows statistics better than me thinks of it.

------
perfunctory
I read somewhere that neanderthals were not less intelligent than humans, but
humans "won" because being more social animals they can better learn from each
other and spread ideas faster. Sometimes I feel like excessive "intellectual
property" laws make us more like neanderthals.

~~~
jimmySixDOF
Anthropologist Joseph Henrik has a theory about H.Sapiens vs Neanderthal using
a Copycat vs Genius metaphor explained in the book Humankind [1]

Copycats are 10x more social Geniuses are 100x more inventive

1 in a 1000 Copycats will invent a new fishing rod but will share this
knowledge with 10 others

1 in 10 Geniuses will invent the new rod and only teach to 1 other

Given a 50% sucess rate for learning:

A max of 1 in 5 Geniuses will ever have the new Fishing Rod knowledge in a
population (50% invented and 50% learned)

Copycats will get to 99.9%

[1] Humankind: A Hopeful History
[https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52879286-humankind](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52879286-humankind)

also

[2][https://aeon.co/essays/forget-the-lone-genius-it-s-
copycats-...](https://aeon.co/essays/forget-the-lone-genius-it-s-copycats-who-
drive-progress)

------
shmerl
Today they serve control freaks who use them to dictate policy. Slap DRM on
anything and then use anti-circumvention provisions to outlaw whatever you
want because "breaking DRM is illegal".

------
reedwolf
A hobby of mine is to wander into libertarian communities and ask if there's
such a thing as "intellectual property," then walk out whistling.

~~~
yolomcsuperswag
As a libertarian, that’s hilarious!

------
therealdrag0
Note this is from 2013

