alt Hacker NewsFortunately, the laws are (currently) implemented by humans, not robots. Patents aren't copyrights aren't trademarks. Copyright isn't a perfect system, but it's the system we have to promote the creation of creative works. It's been perverted by corporate interests, but it has seemed to serve us well enough over the past 250 years. Simplifying it to owning a number is an oversimplification that loses too much resolution because the numbers aren't short ones, they're because computers work on numbers, so the story of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone on a computer boils down to a number to a computer. But it's more than just a number. It's a book with meaning and words, and so logic wants us to reduce it to call it ownership of numbers, but humanly speaking, if JK Rowling wrote a book and it was popular, it doesn't seem absurd for her to get rich off of it.
Patents, unless it's for something truly exceptional, just seem like a good system for getting lawyers rich.
Trademarks I believe in though. If I buy a Caterpillar bulldozer, I should be able to believe that I'm getting a genuine Caterpillar bulldozer, and no one else is allowed to use the name.
Our systems of intellectual properties have been abused, so it's fun to think about culture shifting to one of intellectual property nihilism, but I don't see that happening in my lifetime.
I have the opposite opinion. Patents are tolerable, while copyright is so intolerable that copyright infringement becomes civil disobedience and arguably a moral imperative.
Tolerability is a function of how long the monopoly lasts. The social contract was we'd all pretend we couldn't trivially copy works for some years so that creators could make their well deserved profit, and then the works would enter the public domain. When's the last time you saw your culture enter the public domain? JK Rowling has made her fortunes several times over, yet you and I will be dead for around a century before those works become public.
Nearly two hundred years ago, one man warned everyone this would happen.
https://www.thepublicdomain.org/2014/07/24/macaulay-on-copyr...
> At present the holder of copyright has the public feeling on his side.
> Those who invade copyright are regarded as knaves who take the bread out of the mouths of deserving men.
> Pass this law: and that feeling is at an end.
> Men very different from the present race of piratical booksellers will soon infringe this intolerable monopoly.
> Great masses of capital will be constantly employed in the violation of the law.
> Every art will be employed to evade legal pursuit; and the whole nation will be in the plot
> once it ceases to be considered as wrong and discreditable to invade literary property, no person can say where the invasion will stop. The public seldom makes nice distinctions.
> The wholesome copyright which now exists will share in the disgrace and danger of the new copyright which you are about to create.
> in attempting to impose unreasonable restraints on the reprinting of the works of the dead, you have, to a great extent, annulled those restraints which now prevent men from pillaging and defrauding the living.
Did people listen? No. They doubled down on functionally infinite copyrights. If lasts even longer now. These are merely the results.