Without IP rights, there would be no more investment into sophisticated new technology or medicine. Research and development rather than the raw production is what often times makes up the bulk of a product's aggregate costs.
Big pharma is an outrageous, greedy as fuck pack, but this counterexample doesnt render the concept of patents/IP obsolete. It ultimately comes down to finding a fine balance between the interests of the public and creating an environment where innovation pays off.

This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Jul 21 2020 04:17pm

History says this perspective is wrong. Silicon Valley became the capital of technology due to lax IP laws allowing AMD to directly rip off Intel pin for pin. During this time, Intel didn't stop making better processors just because they would be ripped off in 6 months.

So you don't know what the difference is between what China considers strategic and what is considered strategic in the US-Russia context, do you?


Anyway, a 50 Kt airburst over Los Angeles would be sufficient kill and maim the "right people" and take out an appropriate level of infrastructure to force a surrender by the liberals to the conservatives without affecting more conservative areas like the inland empire. Strategic nukes wouldn't be desirable unless we want to end society as we know it rather than shift the political world as we known it, which is what conservatives desire.

Um, I think it really depends. If a company poured in tens of millions of dollars to come up with something innovative, that effort should be rewarded and protected. Now, we can talk about appropriate levels of markup, but that's very very different than IP theft...

That's actually bullshit and the bulk of scientific discovery was accomplished before capitalism. Capitalism has turned science into an anti-life discipline of nuclear weapons, cloning, abortions, eugenics, bell curves, and what have you.

Why have all the great scientist been dead for centuries?

Gtfo with that opinion.

"Humans would stop doing the thing they have continually done for tens of thousands of years if they didn't have capitalist masters."

This post was edited by Skinned on Jul 21 2020 04:32pm

Kinda depends. I don't think most innovation is actually dependent on IP protection. It takes a lot of time to genuinely innovate that can't be replicated over night.

My default is CPUs. Let's say IP laws were revoked and somebody wanted to start selling a rip off of Intel's processors. That would require they basically start from scratch developing the manufacturing process for 22nm transitors, invest the money to start production, and if they didn't make the product high quality people would still buy mostly Intel since reliability is key to most people. It wouldn't be an over-night job to just start manufacturing true technological innovation. Let's say it takes them two years to do so, that just means Intel has 2 years of an effective monopoly and they have to innovate again in that time frame to ensure they keep the lead, and in between that time process improvements would still incentivize people to buy Intel since they can squeeze out an extra few hundred MHz because they've been doing it for an extra year or two and have made great improvements on the technique.

Medicine is probably the most tricky area though, since getting a medication approved requires years of rigorous trials and once they are done they are done. There is very little problem to just manufacture an organic molecule and purify it compared to the difficulty of running a clinical trial with 500 patients. In that case, yeah, probably best to have IP laws when the disconnect between research and manufacturing is so drastic.

This post was edited by Thor123422 on Jul 21 2020 05:30pm

Items they make can be trademarked and trade secrets kept. Stopping the reverse engineering of and adoption of technology? That's silly. Could you imagine the romans trying to force people to not adopt the keystone in arch building? Lol. "We can't use the stir up, i know they have a great idea and all...".

If a firm can make something but a law stops them from doing what they so someone else is the winner that is very artifical and detrimental and anticompetitive.

This post was edited by Skinned on Jul 21 2020 05:38pm

I'm not opposed to industry specific patent laws. It's very clear that pharmaceutical IP laws should be quite different than electronics IP laws for a number of reasons.



No one is saying that you can't reverse engineer. That leads to innovation. The issue is outright copying a design and then making money off of it.

This post was edited by thundercock on Jul 21 2020 05:37pm

Do IP laws not explicitly stop copying by any means, including reverse engineering?