alt Hacker NewsEverything that Meta owns is either copyright or hardware that facilitates the ownership of its distribution. They wouldn't have the interest or capital to run giant datacenters without the ability to profit from their "owned" users' data. Facebook and Instagram can only be valued because they are proprietary software: a category predicated on copyright. Even Meta's VR headsets are sold at a loss, with a walled garden app store designed to pay the difference.
> Of course those companies hold copyrights and patents, and defend them, because that's the legal environment they're operating in.
Yes, that's the thing I'm arguing against. Would you mind considering it for a moment?
> No, if you are participating in a free market, and a corporation is the most efficient way to provide what you want to buy, then you will end up buying it from the corporation.
That's how corporations immediately outcompete individuals. The argument that a corporation should not be treated as an individual is irrelevant, because that is its role in a marketplace. That's who individuals directly compete with!
> Second, corporations like Google, Meta, Amazon, Apple, etc., as they are now, are creatures of government favoritism, not a free market.
They are creatures in a market. Whether that market is free does not define them, only their opportunity. I agree that they get the opportunity of government favoritism, and that that is a significant part of the issue. My point is that it is not the root cause of the problem. In a "free market" that incorporates copyright and patents, any corporation who owns IP can leverage it as a moat, enforced by state violence. The fact that any individual can do the same does not change the power imbalance between an individual and a corporation: it increases it.
Each of the corporations you mentioned leverages a copyright moat as their core valuation. Even Amazon's anticompetitive behavior is predicated on their vertical integration of Amazon the delivery/fulfillment service with Amazon the marketplace. The fact that a marketplace can be owned at all is predicated on copyright.
> Everything that Meta owns is either copyright
How so? As I understand it, their terms of service (which of course nobody reads, but they're there) say that anything you post on their sites becomes their property, not yours.
> proprietary software: a category predicated on copyright
No, predicated on not letting other people see the source code. That would be true even if copyrights didn't exist.
> that's the thing I'm arguing against
I'm quite willing to consider arguments against copyrights and patents. But I don't think "abolishing copyrights and patents will make the tech giants behave, or at least take away a bunch of their power" is such an argument. As I said in my previous post, as long as they continue to get the government favoritism they have now, they won't care if copyrights and patents are abolished.
> That's how corporations immediately outcompete individuals.
Again, "corporations" is an extremely broad term. A mom and pop restaurant is a corporation. And yes, it "outcompetes individuals" in the sense that a restaurant where one person tried to do every single task probably wouldn't work very well. But that doesn't make the corporation formed to operate the mom and pop restaurant a bad thing.
> Each of the corporations you mentioned leverages a copyright moat as their core valuation.
I disagree, for reasons I've already given, but I don't see that we're going to resolve that here. I simply don't see copyrights as a significant moat for the big tech giants compared to the other thumbs that are on the scale in their favor.