All I know is that this system leads to many undesirable outcomes and at least in some domains I’m familiar with, like software patents, I can think of improvements (don’t grant software patents, just enforce trade secrets).
This is kind of a personal hill I’m willing to die on because I’m pissed enough already that I was born into a world that only just recently - last 200y - either enclosed (land) or ruined (air, ocean) all the other commons in a way that benefits winners (and their descendants) while harming me. But I think that, fundamentally, securitizing creative work is an enclosure of the “commons” that benefits the securitizers a bit much at the expense of the commons, indeed it’s one of the last commons we have left where there’s enough space for the Average Joe but even that is at risk given increasingly strong IP protection and multinational corporations’ patent portfolios.
For one, things like chord progressions in music are of low enough dimensionality that they can easily be fully “enclosed” to clear harm to the public, as their being previously used or invented doesn’t mean derivative-seeming works are actually stealing the IP. For patents, we’re also “enclosing” common sense applications of new technology to domains because our patent office and legal system don’t know any better, and are even setup to facilitate this (see that Texas county that handles a huge portion of patent disputes).
I don’t know all the ways to fix it, I’d rely on the expertise of lawyers and specialists (like people in the EFF) to figure that out. I’m sure people have problems with things I have domain knowledge about despite not knowing exactly how to fix it; that doesn’t mean they’re illegitimate problems. But just like when people take issue with my bigtech stuff, there are a huge number of incumbent entrenched interests incentivized to fight against detrimental (to them) changes, and most experts knowledgeable enough to understand the problem and solutions are actively employed/benefitting from the current system setup. It’s just a hard problem.
This is kind of a personal hill I’m willing to die on because I’m pissed enough already that I was born into a world that only just recently - last 200y - either enclosed (land) or ruined (air, ocean) all the other commons in a way that benefits winners (and their descendants) while harming me. But I think that, fundamentally, securitizing creative work is an enclosure of the “commons” that benefits the securitizers a bit much at the expense of the commons, indeed it’s one of the last commons we have left where there’s enough space for the Average Joe but even that is at risk given increasingly strong IP protection and multinational corporations’ patent portfolios.
For one, things like chord progressions in music are of low enough dimensionality that they can easily be fully “enclosed” to clear harm to the public, as their being previously used or invented doesn’t mean derivative-seeming works are actually stealing the IP. For patents, we’re also “enclosing” common sense applications of new technology to domains because our patent office and legal system don’t know any better, and are even setup to facilitate this (see that Texas county that handles a huge portion of patent disputes).
I don’t know all the ways to fix it, I’d rely on the expertise of lawyers and specialists (like people in the EFF) to figure that out. I’m sure people have problems with things I have domain knowledge about despite not knowing exactly how to fix it; that doesn’t mean they’re illegitimate problems. But just like when people take issue with my bigtech stuff, there are a huge number of incumbent entrenched interests incentivized to fight against detrimental (to them) changes, and most experts knowledgeable enough to understand the problem and solutions are actively employed/benefitting from the current system setup. It’s just a hard problem.