I can't believe I would ever agree with these two, but I actually agree with #Dorsey and #Musk on this, IP law has always at its heart been a protectionist scheme. If all knowledge were freely shared, and no one could stop anyone else from using an idea just because they were the first to the patent office, I think the world would be much further along. I mean the other day I read where someone patented a stick shift in an EV. Why anyone would want a stick shift in an EV I can't imagine, but how is that an idea novel enough to deserve a patent? But the real abuse is where a pharmaceutical company patents a lifesaving drug and then prices it so outrageously high that no one who's not rich (or very well insured, in other words, rich) can afford it.
But won't somebody think of the artists and writers and musicians, you may cry? Well, the problem I have with them is that one of two things happens. In rare cases they retain the rights to their work and then they can keep profiting on work done once. If you were a builder (just as an example), wouldn't you love it if you got paid every time someone uses the building you helped build? But no, you get paid ONCE for the work you did on a given day, and never again for that work. Yet artistic types can keep charging over and over for work done once, every time a copy is sold (at least that is how it is supposed to work under copyright law). Of course in practice the other thing often happens, which is they sell the rights to their work to some huge corporation with IP lawyers up the wazoo, and they get paid a pittance compared to what the big corporation makes. Some mega-stars are an exception, but for every Taylor Swift there are a million musicians, some of whom had big hit recording, that are living in abject poverty, and in the mean time one of the big music companies continues to make money off their work. And heaven help you if you accidentally copy some of their work into some work of your own, because all those IP lawyers need to sue people to earn their keep.
For probably at least the last 50 years, I have believed the whole IP law structure is a scam and a way to oppress people and hold us back (I think we'd have had many marvelous new inventions and cures for disease if no one had to worry about infringing someone else's IP) and to transfer wealth and power to large corporations. Musk and Dorsey have they own reasons for wanting to see these laws abolished, which admittedly are also based on greed, but that misses the point that AI is showing us how fragile and unworkable the current IP laws are. For a very long time, I have said that if reincarnation is real (and I do believe it is, based on scientific evidence but that's an entirely different subject), that if I absolutely do have to reincarnate again, I hope I have some choice in the matter because I would want my next life to be on a planet where there are no IP laws of any kind, and no corporations as we know them.
Jack Dorsey and Elon Musk would like to ‘delete all IP law’
https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/13/jack-dorsey-and-elon-musk-would-like-to-delete-all-ip-law/
#copyright #patent