this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2023
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Maybe I’m just naive, but I feel like it doesn’t really make sense particularly in the internet era. I can understand the argument that patents and copyright can allow people to profit off of their ideas and all, and maybe it would actually discourage anybody from making anything otherwise… But I just don’t really buy that? It seems like patents and rights often end up being held by large corporations instead of creators anyway, and they have incentive to iterate anyway? I dunno.
But in some sense copyright and patents only benefit the owner of them and everybody else suffers as a result. Technically speaking it’s better if everybody can have free access to books and knowledge and works of art, and it’s beneficial for everybody in society if anybody can create things based on other designs and works. Like I don’t really benefit at all from E-ink having patents which stifles innovation in the field just so that they can turn a profit for years before anybody else can… Maybe you can argue that they wouldn’t have invented it unless they were incentivized by being able to weaponize the legal system as a result of their patent findings, but I kind of doubt that… They’d still have a good product that people would want anyway? Maybe I’m just being idealistic, but it seems a huge shame that we can’t imagine that humans would want to create and better the lives of ourselves and others without profit motives, you know? It’d be nice if we could just support each other and work on making cool and better things.
I am cool with that, they wouldn't make it, but some else would. Maybe some years later, but globaly we would benefit much more.
Same like 3D printers, technology is decades old, but started being used after patent expired. F*** them from slowing us down.
Patents and copyright was invented so that invation would happen, but now corporations are ising them to hinder advancement.
Yeah, exactly. Legal protections only really seem to work if you’re already a big enough corporation to afford it, so it doesn’t seem like patents and copyright really support independent creators as much as we would maybe like. It seems more often than not to be weaponized against progress for the sake of personal gains… and that just sucks. The only potential argument for these protections is that people wouldn’t invent or create things without them… Because all things being equal they benefit a select few people (rights holders), and otherwise serve no benefit to anybody else, often leading to stifled innovation and less competition.