[ExI] New IP thread

[Ryan Rawson]

I'm not really sure I buy the analogy in the PS - memory protections
and private thoughts are really not the same as "IP" which is
information people wish to make public and shared with others.

I also think it's an supposition that strong IP leads to more
efficient outcomes. Efficient comes in various flavors too, since an
efficient economy might not have creative solutions and innovations -
does the iPod belong in an efficient economy?

Strong IP has become a threat to those who make things happen and
encourages IP trolls which are a pretty sick twisted outcome of the
current system (and would be more prevalent in stronger IP regimes).
Besides which, no new invention really comes out of thin air, and it
can be a minefield for independent creators to be in the business of
IP creation.  Be it copyright claims, patent threats, or just vague
legal threats, creation ends up being a big-company thing only.

I found Free Culture particularly enlightening - lessig has thought
about this aspect fairly well I think.

-ryan

On Mon, Jul 19, 2010 at 12:56 AM, Rafal Smigrodzki
<rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 19, 2010 at 1:49 AM, Damien Sullivan
> <phoenix at ugcs.caltech.edu> wrote:
>> On Sun, Jul 18, 2010 at 02:12:48PM -0400, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote:
>>
>>>    A socially progressive solution would be of course to have unlimited
>>>    duration of universally binding patent protection on all new drugs,
>>>    without any price restrictions imposed by illegitimate third parties
>>>    (governments). In this way inventors would have the incentive and the
>>
>> No governments, no patents.
>>
>> Takes the power of a government to tell me I can't copy a book I own, or
>> imitate a machine or drug I saw in public.
>
> ### Define "government".
>
> The way I see it, it is possible to have effective IP laws without
> government. In fact, any law content can be generated by
> non-governmental methods, aside from laws that constitute the
> government itself. It's a question of what a sufficient number of
> people believe is right, not an issue of the methods/sources of
> generating laws. Where there is a human desire, there is a way of
> making it into law - and the desire to have strong IP protection may
> lead to highly efficient outcomes, despite its current lack of
> popularity.
>
> I can only advise to try to approach the problem of IP not from a
> first-person perspective but to start with a comparative analysis of
> efficiency of various hypothetical laws, given a range of plausible
> assumptions about the properties of societies where these laws could
> exist. From this exercise you might make guesses about the
> laws (and supporting moral beliefs as well as technological
> constraints) that are efficient, and therefore desirable. Once you
> have that, ask what kind of legal methodology and what kind of social
> organization would be needed to support such laws.
>
> I do believe that a pluralistic, non-governed society consisting of
> entities still recognizably human would be capable of generating
> strong IP protection, and that this would be highly efficient. For a
> vision of a pluralistic society with extremely strong, privately
> provided IP laws see John C. Wright's "Golden Age" series.
>
> Rafal
>
> P.S. An interesting thought occurred to me - compare a society where
> all thoughts of every individual are open to control by other
> individuals (unless specifically protected from external control), vs.
> a society where all individual thoughts are protected from other
> individuals (unless specifically excluded from protection). Draw
> parallels with operating systems that allow any program to execute any
> operations on the code of another program, unless specifically
> proscribed, vs. systems that generally prevent programs from modifying
> each other, unless specifically allowed. Which operating system is
> more robust? This is a good starting point to thinking about the deep
> underpinnings of IP law.
>
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