• Viking_Hippie@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    And always about protecting the hegemony of the rich and powerful.

    It’s never about the struggling artist/inventor just wanting to be paid for their work as the lobbyists and the politicians they own pretend every time they want to fuck over regular people some more.

    • doodledup@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      The rich didn’t come up with the IP. It was the employees who did. They also want to get paid. Imagine someone stealing your ideas and then you losing your job over it.

      • ShepherdPie@midwest.social
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        3 months ago

        B/S. The article states that this company bought the IP from Makerbot in 2013 so nobody working there was responsible for creating these patents. This is like when people claim that piracy hurts the people working on the set of a movie. It actually doesn’t because those people were already paid their wages while the billion dollar corporations are the ones who own the rights and profit off of sales with none of that going to the workers outside of their normal wage.

        • doodledup@lemmy.world
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          3 months ago

          If there is no incentive to make profits on IP, nobody will hire people to develop the IP. Congrats, you made the rich lose their profits but you also made everyone lose their jobs.

          • Maggoty@lemmy.world
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            3 months ago

            Ah yes because nobody had jobs before IP law and nothing was invented.

            • doodledup@lemmy.world
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              3 months ago

              IP law was invented when it became necessary to protect it. We no longer live in a cave but in a globalized and industrialized world economy.

              Most value nowadays is IP. Producing goods is easy, everyone can do that now. Manufacturing is easy. Logistics is easy. Inventing stuff is NOT easy anymore in a digitalized world! So in order to encourage innovation, we need to have incentives that protects your innovation and pays your bills. And since most innovation is IP, we need IP protection. Simple logic. The alternative would be total economical collapse.

              Your idealistic world view simply doesn’t work in this day and age.

              • Maggoty@lemmy.world
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                3 months ago

                No. We did it because IP is inherently anti competitive and we were very concerned with protecting monopolies. They were literally crown granted monopolies. Then they changed in the industrial era to be tools for the Robber Barons. And the corporations after that.

                It has never been a mechanism that creates jobs. It’s entire purpose is to shut down competition, to kill jobs. It has never protected inventors. Just the people who can afford more lawyers to convince the court their design is legally distinct.

                The economy? The economy would boom and we wouldn’t be worried about legally distinct rectangles between Apple and Samsung. (The true message of which is, “don’t you dare try to enter this market, you’ll get sued into the dirt.”)

                • doodledup@lemmy.world
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                  3 months ago

                  You’re just wrong.

                  It has never been a mechanism that creates jobs.

                  IP is what creates most jobs right now. Let’s take software development for example. That would be a 100% share of that. Without IP protection they wouldn’t be able to compete. Even open-source software wouldn’t exist because they are also protected by licenses.

                  Just the people who can afford more lawyers to convince the court their design is legally distinct.

                  This statement is such populistic bs and completely contradictory in itself. If there was no law and order and no IP protection, the big companies will be the only ones to survive. Just think this through for a second. How is a small company supposed to make profits by innovating? The big ones will immediately steal it and put them out of business because they have the economies of scale. Your lawyers will help even less when there is no law that protecs against that. So even if your conspiracy were correct, it’s still a bad argument.

                  The economy? The economy would boom and we wouldn’t be worried about legally distinct rectangles between Apple and Samsung.

                  No it wouldn’t. As I said before: manufacturing is easy. Logistics is easy. Inmovation is hard.

                  If nobody can make profits with innovating then nobody will do ressearch and development. We’ll end up in a world where education is irrelevant, no meaningful innovation will be made and the companies will win that can manufacture the cheapest by cheap labor (as innovation is impossible to make). So slavery will ultimately win and innovation will he stifled.

                  There is a key point you don’t seem to understand: competion in a world where innovation is not competitive is a terrible thing and half of our current digitalized economy will lose jobs.

                  Just think about this for a second. Take software development for example. Running a software, hosting a website, or operating servers for a service are all so incredibly cheap and easy to do. This is not what companies distinguish themselves with. The hard part is writing the software and that is entirely IP protected. If it weren’t, then nobody would put work into this anymore. If 99% of your investment is software development and 1% hosting the service you developed, then why would anyone invest into that if the 99% can just be stolen after it’s finished? The only way to make profits and be competitive in an IP-less world is to not develop or innovate, steal as much IP as possible, enslave people to manufacture as cheap as possible. I don’t think this is the kind of competition you envision.

                  • Maggoty@lemmy.world
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                    3 months ago

                    The software world is entirely dysfunctional because of IP. There’s only so many ways to program a widget. If you didn’t show up in time you get the snot sued out of you and you have to show in court you created that widget with zero input, contact, or experience with the big corporation. Good luck when that corporation is Microsoft or Apple. Open source code actually shows exactly how this would work. Linux has been forked how many times? And Ubuntu, one of the early distros is still going strong.

                    And if big business would never then explain patent trolls. If you want to talk about big business undercutting small ones out of business then we need to talk about monopoly laws, not patents.

                    Nobody said innovation was easy. But you brought up the software world. Specifically open source. Which shows that contrary to libertarian fantasies, innovation does indeed happen without guaranteed monetary compensation.

                    No. Education will not be irrelevant. And slavery will not win because these aren’t patent and innovation issues. And companies will still innovate because people aren’t going to stick around for old tech.

                    You haven’t even begun to prove we’d lose half our jobs. This is just another ridiculous fear mongering segway.

                    And ah yes, why does open source software exist? Don’t they know they’re supposed to be making sure only they can work on that code?!? What’s their motive if they aren’t making money or hoarding it for their own ego like a dragon!