Ask HN: What would you be doing different if copyright/patent law didn't exist?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=596837

by vaksel • 17 years ago

6 10 17 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Would anything change for you or would it stay the same?

pg• 17 years ago

Everything would be running on Berkeley Unix.

buugs• 17 years ago

I'm sure everything would be different considering cloning products and ideas would be free to do which would require innovation to occur extremely quickly or products to be mostly staple goods.

paulgb2• 17 years ago

All speculation, of course:

Most movies and TV would suck because people would be stripped of the motivation to undertake big projects. Music would still be good, because it is less costly and the live experience is worth more than for movies and TV.

Privately funded pharmaceutical innovation would end. Software innovation would accelerate.

bokonist3• 17 years ago

I've been increasingly coming to the belief that Napster killed rock and roll. Maybe I'm just an old fogy at the early age of 25, but I think the music of the last decade has been considerably worse than the music that came out from 1960 to 2000.

People dramatically underestimate how important a great producer is to making great albums. It doesn't cost much for an indie band to make an album, but it does cost a lot to have a producer make it sound really good. The past ten years we've getting an unending stream of Bleach and Kerplunk rather than Nevermind and Dookie.

apu2• 17 years ago

I'm probably going to come off as a pretentious hipster by saying this, but I completely disagree -- I think there is more high-quality music of all types being made now than ever before. The difference is that the good stuff is now rarely on the radio.

Yes, producers are important. No, they don't have to cost a lot or use very expensive equipment. And records are only part of what a musician does. Live shows are so important as well, and you're not (really) going to have the producer to help you out there.

There's always been talent out there, and now finally with costs of producing and selling music coming down, we're starting to see lots more people making music. Of course, now that almost anyone can do it, there's a lot of crap being made. But just like with blogs or stuff on youtube, 90% of it is crap, but the remaining 10% is both better than what used to be the "norm" before and, in absolute numbers, is far larger.

triplefox• 17 years ago

I discussed this yesterday (elsewhere) with respect to games. I couch it in terms of "permission economy" (the present strong IP situation) versus "remix economy" (the weak IP situation)

My analysis is that, first of all, there is a lot of waste overhead involved in large-budget productions. In a remix economy everyone will use the minimum budget possible to produce new material, so producers will operate near perfect-competitor efficiency.

Second, and perhaps more importantly, because all material can be reused, consumers will profit; new material will constantly seek to create new value, rather than to simply create a rebranded version of old value.

This can apply to drugs as well as media. Presently, pharma corporations each jealously guard their research. Hence they are all duplicating effort. In a remix economy, the company that kept secrets would be overtaken by collaborating competitors, because their costs would be too high. They'd get throttled from the overhead needed both to do original research and keep it secret.

paulgb2• 17 years ago

But pharma research is expensive, so what incentive does a company have to fund research if it isn't granted a (temporary) monopoly on the results? They would end up protecting their innovation through trade secrets, which essentially gives them a monopoly until someone duplicated their efforts. This is the situation patents exist to avoid.

Even if a bunch of companies are collaborating to create a new drug, the dominant strategy for a company is to not be involved in the collaboration, since you get the IP without the cost. (Ignoring the possibility of trade secrets)

Ask HN: What would you be doing different if copyright/patent law didn't exist?

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