this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2023
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I have quite a few. I don't believe in copyright laws or IP in general. I think it holds back innovation and exists solely to benefit megacorps like Disney or pharmaceutical companies.
For example - you develop a new drug that really helps some people. You charge $50 a pill even though it costs you $5 to produce. Without the government protecting IP, another company will come around and produce it and sell it for $6 a pill, providing cheaper access to healthcare.
People will say "what would give someone the incentive to make new things?" Without actually thinking it through. For a great example of how lack of IP is a good thing, look at how Shenzhen went from a fishing village to a Chinese San Francisco in a few short decades.. one company will take the product of another and iterate on top of it.
Another unpopular opinion is I'm pretty absolutist with free speech. I think certain things like calls to violence or intentional defamation of character should be restricted. But pretty much everything else should be fair game.
I believe in open borders and think the US should return to the late 1800s style of immigration. We're gonna need the population to compete with China in the coming century.
I also think that the primary investment into climate change at this point should be preparing for the inevitable changes instead of trying to prevent the inevitable.
I disagree with your view on IP, at least for pharmaceuticals. For most drugs, the exclusivity period is only 5 years, after which generic companies reverse engineer the product with ease and create a low-cost alternative. Without this period allowing pharma companies to make their money, there'd be no reason to invest the billions upon billions of dollars into R&D to discover and develop the drug in the first place. Most drug candidates fail, and the wins are what prop up the whole industry.
I'm not defending price gouging and I think all governments should control pricing, preferably with a single payer system (looking at you USA), but we would be so much further behind without patent protection. Especially for orphan diseases.
Don't really agree with you on IP for most creative purposes either. There should be a reasonable length of time you get exclusive rights to something you create. But this doesn't excuse Disney's stranglehold on the mouse.
Yeah with pharma in particular you need that initial profitability, as you say.
Additionally...
This doesn't really make sense. Shenzen company's might have copied products developed by other companies, but surely you still need another company to invest the R & D initially in order to have something to copy.
Consumer products don't "evolve". Developing and producing are two different processes. If there's no IP then there's only an incentive to produce things, and no incentive to develop them. I think this is especially true of pharmaceuticals given that there's no incremental / evolutionary pathway to discovering new drugs and the costs of conducting trials et cetera is preclusive.
Developing new drugs costs millions and can lasts decades, especially because of clinical trials. Without IP protection, the company making the effort to find new drugs would go bankrupt (the price of newly found drugs must also pay for other drug research that did not succeed). I don't know how it works in the USA, in France the system is that that the IP protection lasts 10 years after releasing the drug on the market, then other companies can copy it. And during this 10 years period, the price is regulated by the government.
This is why pharma shouldn't be for-profit, it needs to be socialized for the good of everyone.
I disagree with the climate change thing. There will be inevitable damage, which we should prepare for, but if we donβt try and stop it, even if it is past the 1.5 or more degrees, it will just get worse and worse, until it exhausts our repairs and kills us for good. If we dont stop it even if late, it will spiral out of control.
In an ideal world we would be able to control climate change. The problem is that we don't live in an ideal world. We live in a world defined by economics and war. Energy is the heart of everything- without energy you don't have a modern economy.
Look what happened in Germany right after the invasion of Ukraine by Russia. Germany was getting most of its natural gas from Russia through pipelines. During the course of the war, those natural gas imports fell of a cliff for various reasons. What did Germany do to compensate? They burned coal. Coal outputs much higher carbon emissions than natural gas. Not only in the burning itself, but in the mining process required to get the coal.
So what was the response of the German society under pressure? Put out more carbon emissions. Just a glance at the global geopolitical situation would tell you that crisis isn't going anywhere anytime soon.
I think this is fundamentally the issue. As long as we live in a world with crisis, governments will never let go of quick cheap and reliable energy. When the economy is in trouble, there aren't going to be any politicians advocating for things that could potentially cost the economy. And to get rid of our carbon emissions - we need to feel some pain.
In order to meaningfully prevent climate change, we would need to do something yesterday. Instead, we probably won't be doing anything for the next couple of decades.
Of course, I must end this with a caveat that my comment was made to be a little controversial. I don't believe all attempts to reduce carbon emissions are a bad idea. To the contrary, I believe we should absolutely enact these changes. I'm just expressing a sort of cynical sentiment that since we can't really stop it, we might as well start spending money on dealing with it
for example, like the army corp of engineers spending hundreds of millions of dollars to build a giant sea wall in Miami. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/02/us/miami-fl-seawall-hurricanes.html
but other things to, like building new cities with modern urban planning in order to handle the massive wave of refugees in the future
I agree with all but the last, which I don't completely disagree with, I just don't think it should be the majority yet either.
How does a patent hold back innovation? Producing the same good isn't creating something new.
I can agree that overly broad patents are unacceptable. Ie "something but on a computer".
IP has many many flaws, have to disagree with you on the r&d though. That simply costs upfront money and we don't do a lot of it anymore anyways.
To some degree companies don't even patent their stuff, so that they don't have to publish the inner workings for their competitors. This is especially a problem with china since they pretty notoriously don't give a damn about patents and just copy it anyway. Your Shenzhen example makes no sense to me.
There is enough about ip to dislike anyways:
It is mainly used as a way to sue each other in the corporate world. This is why they patent everything usually.
Patents don't even really have to explain how the technique works (or if it really works) in much detail.
there is little to no recourse if the patent office does not want to grant your patent. On the other hand if they feel like it, they can grant complete shit.
patents are prohibitively expensive for private people, in granting and upkeep.
You have to keep some kind of a compensation mechanism in place that guarantees worldly rewards to inventors, researchers or creators for innovation or art. Otherwise why would they work?
Intellectual "ownership", as ridiculously bullshit as it currently sounds, is the mechanism in place currently. Is there anything else you can suggest?