> Ideas are always shared creations, by definition. If you have an “original idea”, all you really have is noise! If your idea means anything to anyone, then by definition it is built on other ideas, it is a shared creation.

Copyright doesn't protect "ideas" it protects "works". If an artist spends a decade of his life painting a masterpiece, and then some asshole sells it on printed T-shirts, then copyright law protects the artist.

Likewise, an engineer who writes code should not have to worry about some asshole (or some for-profit AI) copy and pasting it into other peoples' projects. No copyright protections for code will just disincentivize open source.

Software patents are completely bullshit though, because they monopolize ideas which 99.999% of the time are derived from the ideas other people freely contributed to society (aka "standing on the shoulders of giants"). Those have to go, and I do not feel bad at all about labeling all patent-holders greedy assholes.

But copyright is fine and very important. Nothing is perfect, but it does work very well.

Copyrights are complete bullshit too though. In your 2 examples. First, the artist I assume is using paints and mediums developed arguably over thousands of years, at great cost. So just because she is assembling the leaf nodes of the tree, the far majority of the “work” was created by others. Shared creation.

Same goes for an engineer. Binary notation is at the root of all code, and in the intermediate nodes you have Boolean logic and microcode and ISAa and assembly and compilers and high level Lang’s and character sets. The engineer who assembles some leaf nodes that are copy and pasteable is by definition building a shared creation of which they’ve contributed the least.

The basis of copyright isn’t that the sum product is 100% original. That insane since nothing we do is ever original. It’ll always be a component ultimately of nature. The point is that your creation is protected for a set amount of time and then it too eventually becomes a component for future works.

> the artist I assume is using paints and mediums developed arguably over thousands of years, at great cost.

And they went to the store and paid money for those things.

And they handed the cashier money and then got to do whatever they want with those things. Now they want to sell their painting to the cashier AND control what the cashier does with it for the rest of the cashier's life. They want to make a slave out of the cashier by a million masters.

Remind me when GitHub handed anyone any money for the code they used?

I'm sure natfriedman will be thrilled to abolish IP and also apply this to the Windows source code. We can expect it on GitHub any minute!

I used to work at Microsoft and occasionally would email Satya the same idealistic pitch. I know they have to be more conservative , but some of us have to envision where the math can take us and shout out loud about it, and hope they steer well. When I started at MS, my first week was heckled for installing Ubuntu on my windows machine. When I left, windows was shipping with Ubuntu. What may seem impossible today can become real if enough people push the ball forward together. I even hold out hope that someday BG will see the truth and help reduce the ovarian lottery by legalizing intellectual freedom.

Talking about the ovarian lottery seems strange in a thread about an AI tool that will turn into a paid service.

No one will see the light at Microsoft. The "open" source babble is marketing and recruiting oriented, and some OSS projects infiltrated by Microsoft suffer and stagnate.

All I know is that if a lawsuit comes around for a company who tried to use this, Github et al won't accept an ounce of liability.

You can't abolish IP without completely restructuring the economic system (which I'm all for, BTW). But just abolishing IP and keeping everything the same is kind of myopic. Not saying that's what you're advocating for, but I've run into this sentiment before.

Sure, but usually I tend to think "abolish X" means "lets agree on an end goal of abolishing X and then work rapidly to transition to that world." So in that sense I tend to think the person is not advocating for the simple case of changing one law, but on the broader case of examining the legal system and making the appropriate changes to realize a functioning world where we can "abolish X".

I agree that it would be a huge upheaval. Absolutely massive change to society. But I have every confidence we have a world filled with good bright people who can steer us through the transition. Step one now is just educating people that these laws are marketed dishonestly, are inequitable, and counter productive to the progress of ideas. As long as the market starts to get wind that the truth is spreading, I believe it will start to prepare for the transition.

In practical terms, IP could be referred to as unique advantages. What is the purpose of an organization that has no unique qualities?

In general, what is IP and how it's enforced are two separate things. Just because we've used copyright and patents to "protect" an organization's unique advantages, doesn't mean we need to keep using them in the same way. Or maybe it's the best we can do for now. That's why BSD style licences are so great.