Example: I believe that IP is a direct contradiction of nature, sacrificing the advancement of humanity and the world for selfish gain, and therefore is sinful.
Edit: pls do not downvote the comments this is a constructive discussion
Edit2: IP= intellectal property
Edit3: sort by controversal
Yeah but you can’t really profit off of that because anybody can print the book. And if there’s no IP, I can just download the book and print it myself. Or read it as a PDF. Or download the IP-free audiobook and listen to that. Even for printed books, competition drives the price to the production costs so very little profit is being made there.
Otherwise big companies would be making big money off of shakespeare and the bible. But that’s not how they make their money, they make their money with IP monopolies instead.
You’re missing how commerce works. A big company can flood the market. They can use better materials and ship faster due to being entrenched.
Like, hey, you could make an iPhone but will you? You can make a movie too, but will it be as good, you can make merch, but will it be as well designed and distributed?
Even in your example, where anyone can make a copy of the book, what about the author? They could pour years and their heart and soul into a book just to make no money, is that ok?
Big companies make money of Shakespeare and the Bible all the time. I don’t know why you would think they don’t, they very much do.
You’re also mixing monopolies with IP. You can have a monopoly with or without IP.
I write scientific articles for a living and i dont give a fuck about some corporation making money off of them. What I do care is whether people can access my articles in other ways too, that’s why they are on Arxiv and ill email them if somebody asks.
If somebody wants to pay for a printed copy or an Elsevier typeset that doesnt concern me in the slightest. And I dont think it would any other author either if they had a decent income like i do from the uni
I think I found the disconnect between your argument and the other person’s. You are not paid as an author, you are paid as an academic or researcher who also writes. Your creation is contractual, like the Disney artist animating the movie and not the author of the fairytale Disney got the idea from.
An author who’s income solely comes from their writing having their work stolen by a company like the academic publishing companies do right now would starve in those conditions, and thus have to find other work instead of writing. A UBI or equivalent is required to support an IP-less state.
The scientific journal industry currently acts as if they exist in an IP free world, and take all the profit from other people’s work. They then enforce IP on others to monopolize that profit, but in a IP-less world they would still act the same and use their size to capture the lion’s share of the market.
I appreciate the comment. Seeing that a system of publishing can work without authors being paid via IP does make a difference. In the short term abolishing IP laws might be bad, but we could replace it with something better, like a UBI, grants for authors, crowdsourcing, and other sources of funding.
And to be clear, we are not living under a UBI. Academics notoriously have to fight over the limited funds that are available to them. Some do need to find other work. Still, nobody is really advocating for an IP-based model. Because it’s not better.
This one I don’t agree with at all. The journals only exist because they can force people and institutions to pay money to get the articles. They would collapse without IP laws. Their power is already decaying due to Arxiv and sci-hub.
I very much appreciate your input and point of view, it is very enlightening. I will fully admit that academia is notoriously cutthroat for funding and I was definitely not trying to say it even comes close to anything like a UBI, just that the publishing portion is a necessary secondary to the primary job of research. Publishing helps secure grants and funding, and is very important, just not the end-all be-all like a literary author. Holding IP/patents is also still a huge draw/money maker for those at the “top” of academia, and there are plenty who advocate for the current IP-based model because it is their primary form of income. I am not saying this is right or wrong, just that academia is not as altruistic as a whole as you appear to be making it out to be
I am also not sure how you can look at the deals publishers and journals make with colleges to ecosystem lock students with things like portal codes you can only get by buying the textbook/resources new from the school and think that the loss of IP protection would do anything to the publishers besides remove the cost they pay the authors. It’s already a scam/racket, and that won’t change without legislation making that illegal.
I also believe that scientific discovery from research universities and any institution getting Federal or State funding should be public domain anyway, both because we the people are paying for it (all or in part), and there is a vested interest in furthering mankind through scientific knowledge and achievement. This is different than entertainment, and even philosophy to a degree.
I think we need to do away with our current system of social support/welfare systems and implement a UBI to offset automation and the changing economy anyway so 100% on board there, and grants for the arts would be great. Crowdsourcing would also be great, and universal healthcare would allow crowd funding to pivot from medical bankruptcy prevention to the intended use of financing creators. I just don’t see IP abolition working without major steps into post-scarcity first.
I mean they do say publish or perish. But technically you are correct. And there are some teaching-heavy jobs too. Also I don’t really care about the people who are at the top of academia.
Absolutely no idea what you’re talking about. I guess it depends on the country. Here, a lot of students pirate their books anyway. Personally, I didn’t buy a single book during my bachelors/masters.
EDIT: but I think we’re getting two things confused here, journal publishing and books. Journal articles and conference proceedings is the thing I wanted to concentrate on because that is the weird edge case where the standard IP / author compensation approach doesn’t apply.
Books within academia work mostly in a similar way to other book publishing, and of course people who are currently making money out of that don’t want that to stop. Which doesn’t mean they’d be worse off without IP based publishing in books in the long term either.
I am glad this practice apparently isn’t universal. Basically the idea is that because pirating books is possible and they don’t get paid again for used books, the publishers have created DRM through the use of web portals that are required to turn in assignments and in some cases even tests. Access to these is provided with a new copy of their books in the school book store, or for the same/more price as the book sold separately. Without the portal, you cannot pass the class because they lobbied the school to make it illegal for teachers to accept your work any other way. The school gets a kickback from the publisher and they both make tons of money
Sounds uniquely american. Is it?