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.