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That some corporations can abuse IP is obvious, but that doesn't remotely imply that the concept of IP itself is either dysfunctional or immoral.

Stallman is completely wrong in all these statements.

He's very shortsighted in fact, his views are 19th century if anything, and they're not even very intellectually founded, or well expressed.




I just DuckDuckWent "richard stallman predictions", and found this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3418340 It enumerates a number of predictions Richard Stallman made, that turned out to be true.

Do not dismiss him too quickly.

By the way, the concept of IP is obviously dysfunctional: ideas and expressions are non rival goods. They are not moved, borrowed, nor stolen; they are only copied from substrate to substrate (be it a mind, a piece of paper, or a computer). Property rules simply don't work there.

What does work is monopoly rules, such as copyright, patents, and trademarks. The use of "property" to describe such limited state granted monopolies is an obvious piece of newspeak, an Orwellian ploy to make those laws look better than they are, and frame the discussion: if you're against monopoly, you're a normal person. If you're against property, you must be a thief of sorts.


There's also the StallmanWasRight subreddit. It can be tongue-in-cheek a lot of the time, but a lot of the topics are relevant.

https://reddit.com/r/stallmanwasright


Thank you for your post. I've never thought of the concept of "non rival goods" nor how the notions of property and monopoly can be abused by people (in the way you describe).


http://blog.ninapaley.com/2011/07/09/culture-is-anti-rivalro... is a nice text about the rival/non-rival nature of things.


Intellectual property is as real as real property. A Native American would make the same argumentyou do, but levy it against the notion of real eatate: owning a plot of the earth is ridiculous.

Your argument against "nonrival" would imply that if a manufacturer creates surplus product, its ok to steal the surplus because no one else needa it.. even if they go bankrupt because no one then buys the non surplus.

And a Marxist would say that labor ia property, and its rheft to deprive a laborer of ownership of their labor. All property is a legal fiction, you cant arbitrarily decide that one kind ia legitimate and the others aren't. Rivalry is just one factor.


> […] "owning a plot of the earth is ridiculous."

I may side with the Native Americans on that one.

There is this idea of a Land Value Tax, where most or all taxes would be taken on naked soil. Such a tax would effectively abolish land ownership, because everyone would effectively rent it from the state. Long story short, it looks like it might work.


> owning a plot of the earth is ridiculous

you'll think differently once you've planted your crops in it


That some corporations can abuse IP is obvious, but that doesn't remotely imply that the concept of IP itself is either dysfunctional or immoral.

Nowhere does rms claim this implication, so this is just a strawman. He doesn't even oppose "IP" as a whole (except for the term itself), just those restrictions which conflict with the Four Freedoms.

He's very shortsighted in fact, his views are 19th century if anything, and they're not even very intellectually founded, or well expressed.

Says the person who fails to make a single argument to justify their position.




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