Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

Hear, hear.

We finally invent a thing (the Internet) that will let us share knowledge for free, and one of the first things that happens is a bunch of lawyers invent more work and job security for themselves by creating this fantasy notion that you can have Imaginary Property and they call it "Intellectual Property" so it's not immediately obvious how ridiculously selfish and society-retarding it is.

We live in a world of actual scarcity and they invented some artificial scarcity to benefit themselves exclusively, then immediately funded a bunch of bribery^H^H^H^H^H^H lobbying to make it illegal to share information for free.

>As someone who makes creative works, I don't _want_ to have to charge people to use/access/enjoy them.

Same here. I self published some stories on amazon and they won't let me charge less than a dollar for them, or I would. I'm infinitely more interested in people enjoying them than profiting from it. In fact, I found that they almost immediately ended up in some pirated torrent and was like, "How cool is that? Somebody thought it was worth pirating."

This notion that creative types won't create without financial incentive seems to come from lawyers, not creative types.




> We finally invent a thing (the Internet) that will let us share knowledge for free, and one of the first things that happens is a bunch of lawyers invent more work and job security for themselves by creating this fantasy notion that you can have Imaginary Property and they call it "Intellectual Property" so it's not immediately obvious how ridiculously selfish and society-retarding it is.

I think your narrative has gotten the relation between the invention of the internet and the creation of the subcategory of intangible personal property known as “intellectual property” very, very wrong.

Like, intellectual property is older than the USA and the internet is... not.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: