Intellectual property laws are in a strange place right now.
Large companies in the west largely fight for IP laws, and generally respect (at least on the surface) the idea of intellectual property rights.
But the internet has made it much harder to control intellectual property, and at the personal level, anyone can find workarounds for accessing all sorts of books, movies, and music without paying for them. Of course, AI blurs the lines around IP laws even more, and makes them even tougher to enforce.
Outside of North America, IP laws aren't uniformly enforced, and often have lower standards for compliance than in North America.
So the overall trend seems to be less respect for IP laws globally, and I've heard a handful of credible people calling for the outright elimination of IP laws.
So let's assume we're heading into a world without IP laws... what are the follow-on effects? What changes might we see in the world if anyone can use, modify, or distribute any piece of content?
Bonus points for non-obvious possible outcomes!
The effect will be that intellectual property of anything digitized (ideas, knowledge, skills) becomes a commodity. Just like "generating a ton of text that to the untrained eye sounds reasonable" has become a commodity recently.
This could lead to a couple of things:
PS: when I was in Europe last month, they were talking there about extending IP laws, specifically to include one's physical attributes, making deep fakes an infringement on copyright. So I'm not so sure that outside North America, IP laws aren't as important as inside it.
Interesting ideas, I wonder if that means we see more or fewer re-mix movies. Lately, Hollywood seems to have found a cheat code where they make lots of sequel and three-quel movies instead of coming up with entirely new stories to tell.
I wonder if we'll form markets for "authentic" content like we form markets for authentic collectibles.
Appreciate the European perspective too, I was more thinking about Asia.
It's a great question. I think we'd see far more versions of very popular stories, like there would be hundreds of Marvel and Star Wars movies by now, but fewer remakes of more minor properties.
Will depend on the individual desire? Say you don't care and just want cheap entertainment on your phone while Copilot is answering your emails for you: you may see more and it doesn't matter. Just don't want to be bored. Someone else, however, will be too busy answering their emails so they don't have time for slop and they watch much less movies, but authentic only, and they pay for that.
I think that we could say that Spotify and Netflix are markets for authentic content, just it's not transactional. The question will be how they're going to react: subscription price 10x and walled garden (which in turn may incentivize some more piracy), or less curation, more slop.
This is worth paying for.
Increased secrecy about new good ideas.
The problem that patents are supposed to fix.
How does one secretly distribute movies, books, or music?
You encrypt it.
What does a user flow look like? Can you walk me through it?
Download app, play music.
Download app, play movie.
Download app, read ebook.
Why doesn't encryption prevent the distribution of "illegal" copies of books, movies, and music today?
Well you asked how to secretly distribute it. If you want a secret kept, you don't distribute it.
The need to keep things secret will fund more privacy measures.
If you were in charge of making sure a new movie earned enough money to cover it's production budget in a post-IP world, what privacy measures would you be considering using?
Are there measures that aren't quite useful enough today, but might be in the future if more money was spent on them?
First thing that comes to mind for movies would be single use only.
No rewinding, pausing or copying, self destructs after one viewing.
Interesting, I guess you could disable the screen recording feature on any laptops that are playing it kind of like how Kindle's web viewer doesn't let you copy/paste text.
Doesn't stop someone from using a separate device to record the movie like how people used to bring camcorders into movie theaters, but it's a start.
I just saw another post that gave me an analogy for this.
The cigarette method of media distribution.The cigarette method of media distribution.
You light it and you smoke it.
Or just let it burn.
Either way it's gone forever a few minutes after lighting it.
A world without IP laws would be interesting because there's a balance of:
So, in some cases, people will still create IP and share it, like Tesla did, to basically push everyone up.
But it's a tough balance. I see it similar to the Open Source (Free Software) movement.
Hmm, perhaps in a world without IP laws, status becomes more important than the financial returns of creating a walled garden.
For example, if anyone can copy or remix anything without consequences, you could imagine artists using that as a metric of success. If everyone copies you, you might not make as much money directly from your work, but you’ll have more of a status legacy.
Civilizations existed prior to IP laws. Stories were still told, and inventions were still made. Those traits tended to be passed on within families. On the other hand, if people try to steal those roles, probably you are going to get fewer stories and inventions.
A world without IP laws would be both liberating and chaotic. On one hand, creativity might flourish—ideas remix freely, innovation accelerates, and knowledge spreads without barriers. On the other hand, sustaining creators becomes harder, since the link between effort and reward is weakened. Perhaps new models of support would emerge: patronage, community funding, or reputation-based economies. The most non-obvious effect, I think, is that the value of originality itself may shift—not in ownership, but in the ability to continually create rather than protect what’s already made.
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