this post was submitted on 10 Dec 2023
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Asklemmy
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Intellectual property rights solve the problem that a market requires scarcity to work, but it goes away with something easy to copy. They solve it by creating scarcity artificially, which is dumb.
I'd like to see government subsidies instead. We could even transition into that by gradually buying up and freeing copyrights and patents. (Trademarks are kind of their own thing, because they're ideally just to explain the origin of an item)
How would that really work in practice though? Would Disney get $100 million for making a movie while I only get $100 for making my own independent movie? It'd be really hard to assign a value to things without the associated system that we currently use.
It's a good point another user also made. I'm thinking private patents that the government regularly purchases is probably more achievable. Otherwise, yeah, you'd have to employ people to estimate the value of an IP from rates of consumption, and it would be complicated
First we'd need good answers to the questions of what specifically should be funded and how much money should be spent overall. Copyright has the advantage of letting markets decide, which IMHO is a good thing in most cases (but not for things like drug patents or any research produced with public funding).
Yes, that would be an issue. If you had a hybrid system, markets could still decide prices, at least. Once the government is the only player things get very tricky indeed.