Red Rozenglass on Nostr: lainy Den Datafag Trollmann :flag: Fish of Rage Paradox Intellectual property, just ...

lainy (nprofile…hmru) Den Datafag Trollmann :flag: (nprofile…csx6) Fish of Rage (nprofile…h6f2) Paradox (nprofile…r3jc) Intellectual property, just like normal property, does not "exist". It is a social construct; if we all agree that if you made a house you own it, and we will all collectively help you protect your rightful ownership of it, then our society has property rights.

You're writing a great book, and you're working with a publisher to edit it and print it, and five other publishers used their spies to leak the content of the book, then publish it faster through lower quality paper and cover and editing, cornered the whole market for your book, did not share any profits with you, and by the time you hit the market you barely make any sales. If we agree as a society that this is a dick move the needs to be prevented, then we have agreed to intellectual property.

You've been developing, for three years, a piece of software for Aramaic schools teaching English, some people hacked your computer, took your code, slapped a different logo and name on it, and sold your software project to all Aramaic English schools in the country, without your knowing, and before you even consider the software finished yourself. If this is a dick move that should be prevented by us collectively, then we have considered software to be intellectual property.

I think publisher companies leaking your book and printing it is /not the same/ as "I gave two copies of Photoshop to my brothers". To treat the latter as a crime equivalent to the first is preposterous.

I think intellectual property and copyright /laws/, as they exist now, and as they're forced on every country that wants to deal with the US of A through trade agreements, are evil. Kids downloading research to do more research for school, are not the same as companies taking your research and building a product from it and making billions while giving you nothing.

Copyright laws were a social contract to help reward authors, now they're a massive oppressive system to reward massive media semi-monopolies. Those are not the same, no matter how much they want us to be gaslit into believing so.

With the advent of computers with near zero-cost copying, the internet with zero-cost copying across distance, and now the collective infatuation with generative AI with automatic constrained remixing of numerous random sources, I think copyright in any shape is likely no longer sustainable. The only ways to sustain it seem to be extremely oppressive and evil. Thus, even if we collectively would love for the writer and the artist to make money from their works, that ship has already sailed, and it is almost impossible to do in current day and age. All artists I know that live from their art do not rely on the idea that copyright will prevent their fans from copying and sharing their artwork, but instead they build a social relationship with their fans, and gain their loyalty and support, and then make income from in-group signaling status "token" stuff, like buying merch, or subscriptions for early access, or paying to color your chatbox with another color, etc.

You can't just keep taking someone else's art and pretending its yours for too long, because the internet immune system, with its infinite eyes on you, at some point, is going to call you out on your lies, and your social capital with your fans will be destroyed. No need for copyright law or governments to be involved.

Copyright laws by now are making more harm than good, I think. We no longer as a society can justify people in the Middle East, India, and Africa dying from preventable diseases because some multi-trillion dollar US company needs to hold the IP for the medicine indefinitely until it can figure out a way to monetize low-income markets. It's evil. We cannot justify sharing research between researchers being a crime, replicating efficient systems being a crime, speeding up the improvement of life across the world being a crime. It's ridiculous.

Pieces of software are just lists of instructions for fast-running bureaucratic systems, and to artificially limit them from being replicated if they were useful to people is ridiculous. To think that software makers can, and should, make money by hiding the schematics of such systems, thus making them unchangeable, unreplicatable, and 100% extra oppressive, is ridiculous. Software can, and should, be left alone to be monetized through side channels just like art can.

And no, you will not be able to make trillions of dollars out of software if copyright law did not exist, but do we really, as a society, need software companies and people to be making trillions of dollars? To be the highest rewarded type of work in the entirety of society and human existence? Are we really going to, through artificial oppressive ridiculous laws, inflate "made an LLM" or "made an iPod", to be thousands to millions of times more rewarded than anything else that can ever be done by a human in service of human kind in all domains of work? What a stupid bubble we live in. I hope to see the day when we look back at the idea of multi-trillion dollar software companies and laugh our asses off about how silly that time of humanity was.

I used the word too much, but I guess I will say it again: ridiculous.

text wall dedicated
to the memory of
Aaron Swartz