218 sats \ 5 replies \ @Undisciplined 12 May \ on: Thoughts on the exoself mostly_harmless
To be fair, some of us do think IP is weird.
I like this term exoself. Sometimes I think about what must be the oldest form of it, which is the version of ourselves that is rendered in the minds of others.
I don't have time for a really thoughtful reply this morning, but I'll loop back in later to see what other people have to say.
To be fair, some of us do think IP is weird.
I'm in camp IP is weird. When I was bothered by it in the past, most research suggested it didn't increase innovation or whatever utility is given as the excuse for the rent-seeking. The political boundaries for and against IP were the most surprising. It was libertarian types that didn't think IP made sense and progressives who were capitalists when it came to, not capital, but ideas. I haven't thought about it much, but there's something interesting at work there.
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The political boundaries for and against IP were the most surprising.
I wonder if it's because the default situation without IP, or at least, the mythology of it, is some lone inventor spends his life pursuing something and then dies a pauper, while others grow fat on the profits of that work.
To me, this one seems damn near impossible to even research with good intentions, since figuring out how to control for assorted factors would make natural experiments really hard to do. I expect people get the results they want to get.
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I expect people get the results they want to get.
Good catch. That was my sense too which is probably why it's such a political thing.
It seems that corporations benefit disproportionately from IP, at the expense of the inventor, but maybe that's hard to appreciate.
I was hoping there might be an interesting double standard. Like, thoughts are sacred and their manifestations aren't.
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I was hoping there might be an interesting double standard. Like, thoughts are sacred and their manifestations aren't.
There's an intriguing idea. Perhaps: the more obviously connected in origin to a human being, the more sacred? And the more connected to abstract hierarchies (e.g., a company) the more profane?
Although I can immediately think of examples that violate it.
I expect there's something to your idea, but it's super nuanced, just like Terry Regier's work showed the underlying sensibility of why prepositions work the way they do.
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I highly recommend the work of Stephan Kinsella on IP.
He’s a patent attorney and after years of trying to justify IP philosophically, he concluded that it just isn’t justifiable.
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