It's funny, I've heard from biomed engineers that it's clear to them that patents don't work in the medical field, unlike how they're effective in the software field.
It feels like every field knows that they're a cash grab without a lot of benefits, but assumes there's some industry that they don't work in where they're needed.
Exactly this. I worked for a few years in big tech, and it was crystal clear that patents and copyrights were awful in tech. But I believed the lie that maybe in medicine, they were needed.
I spent a few years in medical research and realized that ohhhh shit, even worse in this industry.
The whole thing is a big lie.
End copyrights. End patents. The ideal length is zero. There is no case to be made to support them. We need to abolish them outright.
But why have them at all, especially if we’re going to shoot for arbitrary amounts of time?
I don’t buy that IP protections incentivize innovation anymore than they prevent it. The reality is that the gains from intellectual property are not distributed evenly, and corporate executives know this. If IP is making you millions of dollars, that is a very different situation from IP just “making you a living.”
Even if you are doing well as a small IP-based business, you’re still stuck paying a premium on everything you buy (thanks to the existence of IP monopolies), and you still have little recourse against IP violations from large corporations and anonymous pirates.
I just don’t get how this isn’t all an enormous waste of resources for anyone but the already rich, or a completely raw deal for people who mod games, remix music, repair electronics, etc etc.
One slight nit: it helps if you don't spread the big lie "intellectual property" (since it's an oxymoron). Someone here on HN told me about the term "imaginary property" which works great, because then you can still use the "IP" acronym.
So you write a letter and dont want it published by the recipient, you need to file? Or all software written in a company, file? What about confidential stuff, file?
Abolition of intellectual property does not mean abolition of privacy; original author will still have the right of initial publication, but once published, no privacy assumptions and no recirculation restrictions unless registered.
Though this is only one person's personal experience, to me this was an illuminating conversation on the state of medical device repair as a consequence of strong IP protections:
It feels like every field knows that they're a cash grab without a lot of benefits, but assumes there's some industry that they don't work in where they're needed.