I do not like intellectual property laws. I think they should be abolished. Then again, I am 16, so my political ideologies may not be that well fleshed out, but really I seriously do not see any value in them existing
What I don’t like
Here are the core problems I have with intellectual property / copyright laws:
- Stifling of innovation
- Copyright laws allow for you to make something world changing and stop the rest of the world from being allowed to use it. You can stop progression of the entire field just by claiming dibs on… an idea? an implementation? That is Absurd. The Negative effects of this are huge. Look at the situation with video game loading screens. No one was allowed to put a game within the loading screen for their program, because one company got the rights to doing that, and so legally no one else could. You have suffered through so many boring progress bars, and could have been playing pong or tetris or 2048 the whole time. Will go more into depth about the terrible effects on innovation that copyright law has further down.
- Anti Consumer habits not being properly punished
- if no one else is allowed to make the product you are making, you can treat your customers like shit, because where are they gonna go ? you can make your product die every 30 days and make your customers buy a new one, and that’s fine, because you as a company are allowed to just screw them like that, and thats the best way to make money.
- If someone else has an idea that builds on yours, and would make the world a better place, they need to make their thing just far enough from your product to avoid legal consequences for their wish to make the world a better place.
- What’s going on with AI right now is a prime example of this. AI is literally world changing technology, and you are all in a tiff about “Companies are stealing my music!!!“??? Literally shut up. They are not stealing your music. They are training an AI model on your music, and all other music in existence. In the same way if you were trying to train a human music reviewer, or a composer, you would expose them to as much of the music as time allowed, so they could see as many new ideas as possible, to make the best output. Them then making music based off of what they have seen before is not STEALING YOUR MUSIC, it is the basis of all music creation. No one is completely original. AI is also just objectively an insanely valuable to society thing, and trying to stop it to protect people’s intellectual property rights is absurd. The amount of good AI can do, if properly utilized, cannot be truly understood until we live it.
Counter arguments
- People wont make stuff if anyone can just steal everything they do! They wont be able to make money!
- What are you a communist?
- You can’t run a company if any other company can just steal all your ideas!
If you have more counterarguments please let me know and I will document them and put rebuttals in my rebuttals.
Rebuttals
- People WILL make stuff regardless of money. Look at Free and Libre Open Source Software. People develop, and choose to open source, stuff that takes insane amounts of work. They then usually do not make any money off it. Yet free and open source software often pioneers