this post was submitted on 05 Feb 2024
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It's actually valuable in a real world sense yes, but the point is that the mechanisms of capitalism say that if it's completely unscarce its value should be $0. So in a world without IP Law, the instant that piece of information is digitized and put on the internet, it's value rapidly drops to $0 since it costs fraction of a penny for someone to make a personal copy off the closest person / server to them.
We could easily afford to let information be replicated and distributed freely, except for this problem that it doesn't fit neatly in the mechanisms of capitalism because we would stop rewarding first discovery.
So what did we do, did we come up with a new system that rewards first discovery but still allows information to flow freely?
No. We decided to reward first discovery by inventing made up concepts like patents, copyrights, DRM, technological walled gardens, etc. and spend billions of dollars a year on them, all of which function by creating artificial scarcity, just to hamfistedly mash an information economy into the rules of a material economy.
Okay give me this mythical system that rewards first discovery without those ‘made up concepts’
(By the way whatever you type next is a made up concept by your own definition just so we’re clear)
The point about made up concepts is to point out that there is nothing fundamental, foundational, or intrinsic about IP law. It's just an arbitrary system that we made up that we can replace with a different arbitrary system.
It's really not hard to imagine a system where a certain portion of the government budget is devoted to rewarding artists and inventors and then the number of streams / downloads / units sold / etc means that they get rewards from that pool of money. We spend billions on creating systems of artificial scarcity, you put all those people and all that money to work and you can come up with a feasible system that catches most edge cases.
So here's the problem with that idea: it means that you would need to keep the entire IP system operating and add more layers on top of it. For example, you would still need to file patents, it is just that the way that it is monetized by the creator would change.
This means that you still need the same amount of money to keep doing what we've been doing, then you need more money because if things like pixiv uploads are eligible you need way more people to track way more things.
Then you have to actually assess performance of a given thing, be it number of streams / downloads / units sold / etc, meaning that we have to basically track everything happening in the entire economy as well as the entire internet.
Sounds like a bureaucratic black hole to me, but I will grant you that if it was feasible it would probably lead to more innovation.
One thing I will add to the end here is that the current IP laws specifically are currently ridiculous, fuck Disney.