

Freedom In Fashion: No IP, No Patents, No Licensing - nalbyuites
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zL2FOrx41N0

======
sambeau
I've often wondered about Chefs in this respect, too.

While it seems really unfair that the guy who 'invented' Bannoffee Pie never
made his fortune from it it has generally been of benefit to society as:

a) we can all eat Bannoffe pie as anyone can make it and b) it doesn't appear
to stifle the creation of new recipes.

Plus if there had been IP protection for the creation of Bannoffee pie I seem
fairly sure that the Chef would never have seen any benefit - just the owner
of the restaurant and whichever chain store or supermarket he eventually sold
the IP to.

~~~
mikecarlucci
Plus with cooking it can be possible to hide a secret ingredient/cooking
technique with trade secret protection. Look how far Coca Cola has come
without ever giving up their exact formula. We have many varieties of "cola"
to choose from, but still only one Coke.

~~~
sambeau
I was taken by the idea that when anyone can broadly copy anyone else, the
details become more important.

Without copy-protection companies would take the time to get the details right
rather than protect their IP and sit on their laurels.

We would get fewer big leaps but a lot more iteration. Drug companies would be
constantly trying to release products that are 1 or 2% better than the last
one.

I suspect that this would work in society's favour.

~~~
kiba
It is my opinion that people won't start copying until you become profitable,
or at least popular.

People can't just copy whatever people come up with, because lot of these
ideas will fail. So they will try to copy successful models/products. The only
problem is, if they wait too long, they will lose most of the potential
profits.

That's called the first mover advantage and I believe it to be sufficient
incentives.(Because ya simply got there first, before anybody else, therefore
you get looot of money!)

Sometime people also just never got around to copying you. This is especially
true in my experience. My website once got a huge traffic spike from digg one
time. Despite the overwhelming traffic, nobody ever forked my site despite its
liberal copyright policies.

Heck, the first mover advantages apply to the American publishing industry
centuries ago, when there is no recognition of foreign copyright. In some
cases, the British authors actually earn more from their sale of manuscript to
American publisher(so they can be first), than they do from royalties in their
own country.

~~~
AlisdairO
> (Because ya simply got there first, before anybody else, therefore you get
> looot of money!)

It's a sufficient advantage in slow moving industries, or ones where the cost
of innovation is very low. In a world where an exact duplicate of a product
can be made in very little time, it's very little advantage at all.

Your website is a prime example of something where the cost of innovation is
extremely low (and further, the popularity is short term). If you consider the
cost of designing and producing a new car, say, compared with the cost of
copying the design and reproducing it, the economics look a little different.

~~~
kiba
As far as I know, the first mover advantage pretty much applies everywhere,
even in a world where everything can be duplicated in very little time. Heck,
Redhat is a prime example of the first mover advantage.

As far as I know, industries as wide as steam engines, movies, sheet musics,
software, fashions, agriculture, books, newspaper etc have no problem thriving
without intellectual monopolies.(ERrr..actually Hollywood moved to California
to escape the Edison patent regime. Patents delayed the evolution of steam
engines quite a bit and divert inventor resource from R&D and production to
lawyering.)

Either your theory is wrong, or there's more to it than just first mover
advantage.

~~~
AlisdairO
First a note: I'm certainly of the opinion that the system as it stands is
excessively in favour of intellectual monopolies - particularly when it comes
to software patents. I just don't hold the opinion that taking the other
extreme is productive.

There's the obvious prime example: drugs manufacture. The cost to research
drugs and then test them is astronomical, while the cost of producing them is
often very low. Much of the cost of the drug then, pays for the original
research. It takes quite some time for the drugs to pay back the research
cost.

What, then, is the solution to making money in this sector without
intellectual monopolies? Personally, I'm in favour of no intellectual
monopolies in areas where the cost of creation is high. Where the cost is
lower (new, fast moving industries, for example), IP terms would be reduced or
eliminated.

~~~
kiba
The cost of creation is alway high relative to manufacture. It may not be
measured in dollars, but it can be measured in time. The cost of writing
books, the cost of fact-checking, and the cost of marketing, all add up. Think
about the plant growers who must breed generations and generations of plant?
Take my website for example, the opportunity cost in creating the content is
enormous. Duplicating only takes a few hundred dollars and maybe 3 hours.
RedHat almost certainly spend millions of dollars investing developer man
hours in their distro and the linux kernel.

The pharmaceutical industry costs' is surely higher than usual. However, the
original drugs can sell for very high price, even when generic versions
introduce market pressure.

The high cost of creation is not unique, and not limited to pharmaceutical
industry. It is only relatively speaking that pharmaceutical industry's
creation cost is much higher.(Don't forget that some of the cost are certainly
inflated by an overly risk averse regulatory agency.)

In any case, introducing intellectual monopolies is a dicey game. Not only you
must balance the incentives, you must also manage the bureaucracy, take into
account wasted cost opportunity that could have went into research and
marketing. If somebody exploit a loophole, it would take forever to change the
law because congress is slow, or because of huge opposition pressure. People
can be brought to favor certain corporations.

So you want to support a system of intellectual monopoly? Good luck balancing
all the incentives, disincentives, and things that come up that you didn't
know about. To underestimate the difficulty of managing a regulatory system is
to fall prey to the _planning fallacy_.

~~~
AlisdairO
I agree that the cost of writing books is high, which is why we have
copyright. Your website is a poor example: you wrote something which was
popular for maybe a few days/weeks. Your investment was (I assume) repaid over
that time. To any viewer of your site, there is no cost to visiting you over
visiting any other site, so there is no incentive to find/use an alternative
source. I completely agree that, in such a scenario, being the first to market
is a sufficient benefit, and that such content doesn't need much in the way of
protection.

Some drugs are expensive to manufacture, yes. A great many aren't, too.
Regardless of that, the company that doesn't have to invest in researching the
drug will _always_ be able to turn out a cheaper product, and thus reap the
large majority of the profit: there being an incentive in this case for
consumers to find cheaper companies. There is no reasonable likelihood of the
company doing the research covering its costs in this scenario. If drugs had a
life span of a few months, this wouldn't be the case, but they are used for
much longer periods of time.

I don't underestimate the difficulty of running a regulatory agency: so much
is plain from the mess that the US' system is currently in. I just think that
the alternative of making research in many industries a waste of time is even
worse. While I favour a more radical overhaul, a few simple changes, such as
eliminating software patents, would make the US system much more reasonable.

~~~
kiba
_I agree that the cost of writing books is high, which is why we have
copyright. Your website is a poor example: you wrote something which was
popular for maybe a few days/weeks. Your investment was (I assume) repaid over
that time. To any viewer of your site, there is no cost to visiting you over
visiting any other site, so there is no incentive to find/use an alternative
source. I completely agree that, in such a scenario, being the first to market
is a sufficient benefit, and that such content doesn't need much in the way of
protection._

Now, are you simply just glossing over what I have told you about books and
British authors? Do I have to point to you to an example of a public domain
video game that actually made money? Since when my website stop being visible
to the world after digg has made it through? I still get thousands of visitors
each month.

 _such as eliminating software patents, would make the US system much more
reasonable._

Do you have any sense of history whatsoever? When is at any point in history
that the US patent system actually function the way it supposed to?

I can points to you horror stories about patents gone bad in the 19th century
and the music sheet wars as well various submarine patents.

It's not some problem that suddenly pop up in some modern time that only
impact the last 30 years or so. It's a problem that exists throughout economic
history.

~~~
AlisdairO
I did see what you wrote about British authors, I just didn't really consider
it relevant:

> _Heck, the first mover advantages apply to the American publishing industry
> centuries ago, when there is no recognition of foreign copyright. In some
> cases, the British authors actually earn more from their sale of manuscript
> to American publisher(so they can be first), than they do from royalties in
> their own country._

I read this as "Way back, when distribution was substantially slower, so
copying was much harder, _some_ people's books were much more popular in the
US than in Britain."

Seriously. In the modern world, all that you need is for one person to pay,
and make a copy. All other copies can then be made for free. The advantage to
being first in this situation is microscopic.

> _Do I have to point to you to an example of a public domain video game that
> actually made money?_

More per developer-hour than a decent commercial game? I'd certainly be
interested if more than a tiny handful had pulled this off, yes.

> _Since when my website stop being visible to the world after digg has made
> it through? I still get thousands of visitors each month._

Thousands of visits per month is hardly going to be of interest to someone
looking to make real money. The initial digg spike would be, but I covered
that earlier.

> _Do you have any sense of history whatsoever? When is at any point in
> history that the US patent system actually function the way it supposed to?_

Of course you can point at problems. I said that the system would be made much
more reasonable, not that it would be fixed. You seem to be thinking I'm
coming at this from an idealistic 'I love IP' angle, rather than a pragmatic
point of view. I do get that the system causes issues - I just think your
alternative is much worse.

------
tuxychandru
I'm not a big proponent of IP in general. However, I feel comparing a creation
which can be converted to a digital form to one which cannot doesn't make much
sense.

In the industries with top 3 sales showed in the video (Food, Auto and
fashion), the product cannot be transfered to another person without losing
your won possession. Even if you copy a design you still must manufacture the
apparel. Even if you copy the design of a car you still must manufacture it.

However, that's not the case with software, music or movie transferred over
the internet. You don't have to re-write a software to share a verbatim copy.
You don't have to direct and shoot the whole movie again to make a copy of it.

~~~
sambeau
It will be interesting to see what happens when we finally have replicators

~~~
kiba
Thingiverse community + Makerbot Inc. versus The Lone Inventor with a patent?

I'll root for thingiverse people anytime. Nothing ruin the party more than a
jackass telling people not to invent, design, and engineer, and make a living.

------
motters
The claim that open source doesn't have copyrights tends to cast her other
claims into doubt. But in principle it would be great if there were no
copyrights or patents in software. It would mean fewer things to worry about,
and a whole category of grief would disappear.

Fashion is not exactly analogous to software though, because in fashion there
are physical atoms which are difficult to copy and move around.

------
mgw
This is an amazing slide: <http://imgur.com/MbIuc.png>

~~~
retube
Hmmm. I would have thought automobiles was very high IP. No reference, but
don't VW or Audi hold more patents than any other company in the world or
something? Or take consumer goods. Unilver, Sony etc submit 100s of 1000s of
patents every year.

Anyway, that aside, even if this chart is correct, a correlation __does not
__imply any kind of causation. There many be any number of reasons why Food
has more money spent on it (perhaps because we need food to survive and music
consumption is purely discretionary?)

~~~
lutorm
Yeah the automobile industry has patents, it sounded like she was talking more
about the design aspect.

------
bmunro
The comments for this video are a lot more intelligent than usually found on
Youtube.

------
sambeau
I suspect that, had the car industry been encumbered with IP we would have
been driving Model-T's for a lot longer than we did.

~~~
anamax
The early car industry had lots of patents and patent fights.

The guy who invented working intermittent wipers was an independent. The big
three refused to pay but used it.

There's currently a case involving a safety device for saws. Home Depot
installed it and their injury costs went down by $1M/year. They refuse to pay
royalties.

~~~
itgoon
The Home Depot case has been resolved in the little guy's favor:
[http://blogs.findlaw.com/decided/2010/05/unkindest-cut-
home-...](http://blogs.findlaw.com/decided/2010/05/unkindest-cut-home-depot-
pays-25-mill-for-safe-hands.html)

------
mmphosis
<http://www.neilpoulton.com/>

------
Charuru
Though I don't know much about fashion, I can't help but think that the
investment required to think up of a new fashion design must pale in
comparison to the investment required for innovation in other industries.
Perhaps years to write a book, millions to shoot a movie, millions to design a
chip.

That probably makes all the difference in terms whether or not IP is a
socially beneficial system.

~~~
sambeau
Although, as she pointed out, this argument doesn't work for car design

~~~
eagleal
You don't buy cars only for their designs. The engine which really is part of
what makes the difference (the other one being manufacture material) is
patented.

And the GPS system (eg. your Navigator), electronic/computer board, and all
this things that make you buy a Mercedes instead of a Hyundai, are patented or
at least protected by IP.

Again she is comparing the "appearance" of the utilitarian market, not the
engineering part of it. (You can patent and reinforce a new material for
t-shirts which is unbreakable).

~~~
lutorm
_You don't buy cars only for their designs._

Oh I disagree. I think designs matter a lot more to a large fraction of people
than you might think.

I think luxury cars have much in common with fashion, in the sense that people
who would buy a Mercedes would _never_ buy a Hyundai even if it had all those
identical IP in it. Once you get above midrange (ie Toyota), a car is much
more about status symbols and conspicuous consumption than features. Just like
fashion.

