Which is worse:
1. Alexander graham bell patents telephone at time t. Elisha Gray attemps to patent telephone 1 at time t + 1 hour from independent research...many years. Government prohibits gray from doing telphone stuff because Bell registered first.
1A. Does the time frame matter? There were at least 2 other folks working on this...and they were within a year or two of figuring it out.
1B. What if a Tesla indeendently discovers it in his country...moves to the USA...and discovers it in existence. His idea... stop him from using?
2. HP develops a printer technology. Canon buys a printer, strips it...discovers the tech. Copies it. Makes printers with same tech?
Is 1 worse or 2 worse?
Simplifying assumption: It is effectively impossible to independently discover whether a real life case is case 1 or case 2...so let's not talk about distinguishing.
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Why assume we can't distinguish between the two?
The second scenario seems worse.
1. Because very often we cant.
2. Serious case of disagreement. I consider (1) very bad both morally and growth-wise and (2) mildly unfortunate, with few real impacts.
3. But that's why the position is up there...to show the differences in thinking.
mildly unfortunate, with few real impacts.
How much money can HP make from an expensively R&Ded product if Canon can quickly replicate said product without the burden of a large R&D dept. and sell for much less? Why would HP invest in said R&D if it couldn't make money?
I'm sure we can agree that Hollywood would have a bitch of a time if the instant it produced a DVD of a new, expensively made film a rival copied it and sold it for their marginal cost. How different are these situations?
Also I think you are a bit unfair in limiting the argument here. Information increases over time (generally, but sometimes I wonder) and we should be able to craft IP law to account for different scenarios.
The difference is the broken window fallacy.
You see how the current situation would be impossible without IP. That is true. Instead a much better situation would be possible. We don't necessarily know what that is yet.
Though for DVDs I do. Meter bittorrent. The studio sells their film to a pipeline firm for a single lump sum. The risk is transferred the pipline/publisher. They then sell it at huge prices to the earliest adopters, who in turn recoup most of their cost by replicating the bits downstream.
In the end everyone gets paid, except nobody's trying to secure things which cannot be secured. Solved by giving people rights instead of trying to take them away, specifically the right to profit by selling their upload bandwidth.
If indeed IP is necessary in some cases, the market will replicate the system. Of course this is a major reason the Gov can't ever let IP be abolished. The more it does things like that the more obvious its uselessness becomes. Politicians aren't stupid. They know this.
Though for DVDs I do. Meter bittorrent. The studio sells their film to a pipeline firm for a single lump sum. The risk is transferred the pipline/publisher. They then sell it at huge prices to the earliest adopters, who in turn recoup most of their cost by replicating the bits downstream
Is this how you meant to say it, and if so do you have a link that describes this in detail?
I have this, but it's old and therefore badly written.
Also it doesn't look like I really say much I didn't fit into that comment. In any case this is all impossible because it would require IP deregulation.
I'll add that you'd have Bittorrent dynamically auction off the seed data. This is important because most people don't have the spare cognitive capacity to spend on worrying about what to price their bits at.
Essentially you'd just tell BT what you wanted to buy at, and then it would sell it for you at whatever price it could get. Set it to go, it'll beep when it's ready. (So, perfect market segmentation.)
1 is evil for multiple reasons. 2 is not even a problem once you realize that in the same environment in which 2 is possible, HP also probably borrowed heavily from others, so the act of progress and invention becomes (as it once was before IP created barriers to learning) innately cooperative and distributed with everybody adding their bit of creativity in a bid to be first to market with an improvement.
Alrenous: I like the idea, but we still need some kind of protection along the line, ex. Disney would be tempted to sell a new movie to multiple pipelines. Contract might solve this, but contract disagreements put us on the same statutory road we are on today.
That kind of thing is self-enforcing. Disney tries to sell to multiple piplines...and pipelines learn to discount Disney asks by 1/n, where n is the number of piplines.
If Disney can't be trusted, it won't be trusted.
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