by ninetyninenine | 2025-08-16 03:35:38+00:00
>Did humanity really pick that? I doubt it. Copyright infringement happens too often and too normally for me to believe people care about copyrights. Politicians bought and paid for by lobbyists picked that.

Let's focus on the overall idea. IP. not the instantiations of the idea like patents and copyright. You're against the very idea of ideas as property. And YES humanity chose the concept of IP. It's encoded into the laws of government which people trust. Additionally entire businesses and corporations building civilization changing technologies ONLY exist because of IP.

>Also, nonexistence of ideas is incompatible with human nature. People will create, profit or not. They must. The creative output will significantly decrease but it will not be wiped out. As a free software developer, I am living proof.

Human nature is prehistoric instincts for hunter gatherers. Capital, profit, business and centralization of power is responsible for the ideas responsible for human civilization as we know it.

How do you mobilize thousands of humans to create a boeing 747 which is unionization of multitudes of people crystallizing ideas and focusing human effort to creating a feat of an idea that no single human can create? Capital and centralization of power.

You need to pay people, you need to take advantage of their need to survive and get a living wage to motivate such endeavors. You need the incentive to make them rich to have a person coordinate others into creating things like spaceX or google or openAI.

Obviously I am talking about the non-existance of MANY ideas. Not all ideas. And those "many" ideas make up almost all of human civilization itself.

You are a free software developer. You live off of charity. You're fringe. You're a side effect. Business engines drive profit and people get paid and that excess money is charitably given to you. If the business engines didn't exist you wouldn't. You are the exception to the rule. A massive exception, don't get me wrong, but still an exception. Open source would not exist were it not for closed source.

>I am not as strongly opposed to patents as I am to copyright. Unlike copyrights, patents actually expire in reasonable timeframes. Patents have none of this lifetime plus a trillion years nonsense. They also typically apply to physical goods and inventions.

In principle they are the same. Medicine that saves lives wouldn't exist if it wasn't for patents. You tolerate patents but the essence is you think it's wrong, that is the issue I am addressing. If patents didn't exist most big pharma medicines wouldn't exist.

Do you tolerate the non-existence of life saving technologies created by big pharma in order to satisfy their own human greed? Covid for example. Think about the thing that drove big pharma to create these vaccines. 80 to 90 billion in profit is what drove these companies to develop these things at a speed and scale that won't exist without closed source.

What mobilized the smartest minds to work together in such synchrony to produce the vaccines? You think patreon could do it? You think a future surviving off of donations from patreon would motivate all the smartest minds to spend years on training to develop the expertise necessary to stop the pandemic and then finally come together for patreon? lol.