Quote:
Originally Posted by leebase
But, unlike with fiction, I do support time limits on patents because there isn’t an infinite number of ways to join wood together.
And yes, I agree that the “gimme gimme” accusation can be flipped. How greedy farmers are for thinking that their farm should be able to go to their children. Or that land can be owned in the first place. There is nothing special about intellectual property. If one doesn’t respect the concept of property....even physical property can be deemed “no longer yours but ours”. I won’t go further down that trail as it’s politics.
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I'm no lawyer, but wouldn't the application of physical property rights for IP involve a whole stretch of new legal problems? In your vision of things, there ought to be some sort of inheritance or "death" tax for IP just as for farms? Who would perform the valuation? Wouldn't there be a speculation market? What would happen if the heirs couldn't pay the tax levied against them? Would the state take over? Earlier on you mentioned farms passed on from generation to generation. Since many people use their property as collateral for loans, a more apt expansion of that analogy would be a bank foreclosing on a farm due to debt/insolvency, etc. But then the bank would own the property, wouldn't it? And it would have no obligations to
develop the property, it could burn it down if it so desired. There would be nothing to prevent the appearance and growth of what is the equivalent of hawkish real-estate developers from buying up foreclosed properties and using them for their own profit.
In that system, you would be opening up creative works to: price hiking, market manipulation, bank fraud, IP bubbles, speculative trading, which would most likely create a system of nefarious practices (like expensive and frivolous litigation) designed to force the heirs of middle-of-the-road IP rights to sell to a conglomerate. Or worse, practices of systemic IP devaluation in a virtual market that no one truly understands. And once things go corporate, how would that play into the aforementioned abandonment of IPs that would slide into public domain? Again, the state would have to define legal requirements as to what constitutes "minimal investment" in an IP to retain the rights. You can be certain of one thing - corporate lobbyists would craft those regulations in a way that suits their interests, not the interests of all IP holders.
As I've stated, I'm no lawyer, but I see plenty wrong with the state of property rights across the globe to believe it is a good alternative for anything, as some of the dangers I've mentioned here point to. You seem to believe (correct me if I'm wrong) that property rights empower the individual, and because of that you seem to ignore the abuse by corporations of these same rights. Heck, even with the current legal framework we see scores of copyright outsourcing agencies taking down videos on YouTube and squeezing the pennies from hapless creators for 20-second clips of audio. Can you imagine the havoc corporations would wreak if empowered further? There are things implied in what you're suggesting that can't really be dismissed through blanket statements or hyperbole. Rather than argue with you on what the starting principles should be, I'm more interested in taking your position as a basis for further discussion. How do you believe it would actually work?