6 ms·

No intellectual property protection means you destroy the next generation of scientists. It's dumbfounding to watch everyone equate piracy with hollywood movie

No intellectual property protection means you destroy the next generation of scientists. It's dumbfounding to watch everyone equate piracy with hollywood movies, while the real innovators and scientists get thrown under the bus by theivery. It is order of magnitudes more difficult to spend 10years studying something when your work can be stolen and reproduced at any moment. The world is broken and ctrl c, ctrl v broke it. Don't expect einstein level scientists and their downstream products that started the computer revolution... you killed the protections needed for the people that made it, cause you wanted movies for free. It's insanity.

barfbagginus 3y ago
[flagged]
- rhelz 3y ago
  > Intellectual property has no reason to exist Intellectual property is a very weird construct. Imagine if we had Star Trek-style replicators, and in principle there was no scarcity of, say, diamond rings, but we passed a bunch of laws which forced you to pay $10,000 if you wanted a diamond ring. But we do have Star Trek-style replicators for information!! So why do we take something which has no intrinsic scarcity, and impose this whole edifice copywrite, patents, etc, to artificially create scarcity, and make it property? Because private property is how we keep score: you can get stuff you want if you make enough stuff that other people want. Market prices--how much you have to pay for stuff--is how we collectively decide what kinds of stuff other people want. We have no other way of 1) signaling what kinds of stuff we want produced, or 2) motivating people to produce the stuff that everybody else's actually wants. Or, at least, it's the best way we've found to predict and plan what to do, without wasting effort and resources on stuff nobody wants. We don't have to do it this way. Richard Stallman suggested a software tax: 2-3% of society are good programmers, so if we taxed society 2-3% of GDP, and distributed it to all good programmers, we could just let them work on whatever they wanted as long as they gave it away freely. It's a great idea really. At least we wouldn't have the best computer science minds furiously working on how to make us doom scroll. But it's fair to ask, who decides who is a "good programmer?" How do we decide the appropriate tax rate, to ensure we're getting enough software? If programmers can work on whatever they want, how can we ensure we get the software we want and need? How do we allocate the money? Do we just distribute it evenly? Or do programmers get more proportional to (insert bogus metric here)? We don't have any better way of answering those questions than by just creating a market for IP. And for a market to exist, there has to be scarcity. Treating information the same way you treat a plot of land or a case of beer seems really artificial, and it is absolutely artificial, but we don't know any better way to do it.
  - barfbagginus 3y ago
    [flagged]
  - barfbagginus 3y ago
    I had no idea about stallman's programmer tax - that actually sounds kind of awesome! I think that ends up in a situation similar to The sciences - if you want to take on pay as a free programmer, not only does your work need to be open source, but it needs to take on a genuine need as defined by the rest of society. I imagine a market of sorts, where programmers are able to shop for valid "jobs". Jobs may even be defined by organizations of some sort. No jobs in this market are designed to help exploit users, and the generated code belongs to the legacy of all of humanity. You start getting paid once you start sending accepted PRS to established projects. And you can start your own projects and get them accredited. It's not a perfect plan by any means - after all the sciences are already funded by about 4% of federal spending, and they use a similar accreditation process. But they too are struggling due to misaligned incentives and capital structures, such as publish or perish and the academic publishing industry. The resulting replicability and accessibility crisis is a serious inefficiency in turning science into a benefit for humanity. It's quite hard to put the finger on the precise cause of all these misaligned incentives. But it is getting very very critical that we do. The ever increasing urgency of the matter will capture our best minds, I believe. I know it has guided my work as an open source commune director, open source contributor, open source mentor, and mathematician.
throwaway4220 3y ago
Really not following this. As an ex-academic, plagiarism still carries heavy penalties, and would still be punished if there is no intellectual property, right?

barfbagginus 3y ago

[flagged]

rhelz 3y ago
> Intellectual property has no reason to exist Intellectual property is a very weird construct. Imagine if we had Star Trek-style replicators, and in principle there was no scarcity of, say, diamond rings, but we passed a bunch of laws which forced you to pay $10,000 if you wanted a diamond ring. But we do have Star Trek-style replicators for information!! So why do we take something which has no intrinsic scarcity, and impose this whole edifice copywrite, patents, etc, to artificially create scarcity, and make it property? Because private property is how we keep score: you can get stuff you want if you make enough stuff that other people want. Market prices--how much you have to pay for stuff--is how we collectively decide what kinds of stuff other people want. We have no other way of 1) signaling what kinds of stuff we want produced, or 2) motivating people to produce the stuff that everybody else's actually wants. Or, at least, it's the best way we've found to predict and plan what to do, without wasting effort and resources on stuff nobody wants. We don't have to do it this way. Richard Stallman suggested a software tax: 2-3% of society are good programmers, so if we taxed society 2-3% of GDP, and distributed it to all good programmers, we could just let them work on whatever they wanted as long as they gave it away freely. It's a great idea really. At least we wouldn't have the best computer science minds furiously working on how to make us doom scroll. But it's fair to ask, who decides who is a "good programmer?" How do we decide the appropriate tax rate, to ensure we're getting enough software? If programmers can work on whatever they want, how can we ensure we get the software we want and need? How do we allocate the money? Do we just distribute it evenly? Or do programmers get more proportional to (insert bogus metric here)? We don't have any better way of answering those questions than by just creating a market for IP. And for a market to exist, there has to be scarcity. Treating information the same way you treat a plot of land or a case of beer seems really artificial, and it is absolutely artificial, but we don't know any better way to do it.
- barfbagginus 3y ago
  [flagged]
- barfbagginus 3y ago
  I had no idea about stallman's programmer tax - that actually sounds kind of awesome! I think that ends up in a situation similar to The sciences - if you want to take on pay as a free programmer, not only does your work need to be open source, but it needs to take on a genuine need as defined by the rest of society. I imagine a market of sorts, where programmers are able to shop for valid "jobs". Jobs may even be defined by organizations of some sort. No jobs in this market are designed to help exploit users, and the generated code belongs to the legacy of all of humanity. You start getting paid once you start sending accepted PRS to established projects. And you can start your own projects and get them accredited. It's not a perfect plan by any means - after all the sciences are already funded by about 4% of federal spending, and they use a similar accreditation process. But they too are struggling due to misaligned incentives and capital structures, such as publish or perish and the academic publishing industry. The resulting replicability and accessibility crisis is a serious inefficiency in turning science into a benefit for humanity. It's quite hard to put the finger on the precise cause of all these misaligned incentives. But it is getting very very critical that we do. The ever increasing urgency of the matter will capture our best minds, I believe. I know it has guided my work as an open source commune director, open source contributor, open source mentor, and mathematician.

throwaway4220 3y ago

Really not following this. As an ex-academic, plagiarism still carries heavy penalties, and would still be punished if there is no intellectual property, right?