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0 pointssigil15y ago0 comments

If your creation is completely unprotected, there's less incentive to create it in the first place. Would you be as likely to put a year of your time and money into creating something, if you knew it would just be ripped off and profited from the instant you released it?

On the other hand, if copyrights / patents lasted forever, the beneficial effects of competition might never kick in, and in the long run consumers would be the worse off for it.

So I see copyright / patents as a practical rather than a theoretical issue: what's the optimum term for the protection? What length of time will result in the greatest benefit for us all in the long run? Should it vary by type of creation maybe -- shorter terms for less capital-intensive creations, longer terms for others? It really is an optimization problem. The authors of the U.S. Constitution seemed cognizant of the tradeoffs and that they might need tweaking [2].

There was a fascinating story about a manufacturer of bra-rings in a National Geographic article about Chinese "Commodity Towns" a while ago [1]. I'm not sure what Chinese IP law is like, and what recourse if any the original inventor had, but it illustrates the problems quite well.

[1] page 2 and 3 of 8, http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0706/feature4/text2.ht...

[2] "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries" http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Constitution_of_the_United_Sta...

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tambourine_man15y ago· 2 in thread

Would you be as likely to put a year of your time and money into creating something, if you knew it would just be ripped off and profited from the instant you released it?

If I could just as easily rip of and profit from other's work? Sure.

It turns out people either do a crappy job at copying you, in which case your are fine, or they do a much better job than you did, which means you just have to work harder.

adrianN15y ago

It's hard to pay rent when your only profit is the ability to copy other people's work.

derleth15y ago

> It's hard to pay rent when your only profit is the ability to copy other people's work.

Worked for Edison.

On a more serious note, if everyone is copying from everyone else, we're all on a level in that respect and the only differentiating factor becomes, again, some kind of individual talent. It might be an Edison-like talent for copying, a more Negativland-like talent for copying and remixing to make something new, or a Brian Wilson-like talent for creating something that's about as novel as anything can be.

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