

Ask HN: What would you be doing different if copyright/patent law didn't exist? - vaksel

Would anything change for you or would it stay the same?
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pg
Everything would be running on Berkeley Unix.

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paulgb
All speculation, of course:

Most movies and TV would suck because people would be stripped of the
motivation to undertake big projects. Music would still be good, because it is
less costly and the live experience is worth more than for movies and TV.

Privately funded pharmaceutical innovation would end. Software innovation
would accelerate.

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triplefox
I discussed this yesterday (elsewhere) with respect to games. I couch it in
terms of "permission economy" (the present strong IP situation) versus "remix
economy" (the weak IP situation)

My analysis is that, first of all, there is a lot of waste overhead involved
in large-budget productions. In a remix economy everyone will use the minimum
budget possible to produce new material, so producers will operate near
perfect-competitor efficiency.

Second, and perhaps more importantly, because all material can be reused,
consumers will profit; new material will constantly seek to create new value,
rather than to simply create a rebranded version of old value.

This can apply to drugs as well as media. Presently, pharma corporations each
jealously guard their research. Hence they are all duplicating effort. In a
remix economy, the company that kept secrets would be overtaken by
collaborating competitors, because their costs would be too high. They'd get
throttled from the overhead needed both to do original research and keep it
secret.

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paulgb
But pharma research is expensive, so what incentive does a company have to
fund research if it isn't granted a (temporary) monopoly on the results? They
would end up protecting their innovation through trade secrets, which
essentially gives them a monopoly until someone duplicated their efforts. This
is the situation patents exist to avoid.

Even if a bunch of companies are collaborating to create a new drug, the
dominant strategy for a company is to _not_ be involved in the collaboration,
since you get the IP without the cost. (Ignoring the possibility of trade
secrets)

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buugs
I'm sure everything would be different considering cloning products and ideas
would be free to do which would require innovation to occur extremely quickly
or products to be mostly staple goods.

