alt Hacker NewsIn the very long run I'd hope we get sane intellectual property law: Software and logic circuitry is mathematics and should be unpatentable and trade secret is about the only protection for software/firmware/hardware; copyright terms shortened to the actual window of profitability (5-10 years) and only applying to "business logic". Nothing else makes much sense in the modern world; standards and interoperability benefit everyone to such an extent and change happens so rapidly that the majority of existing IP protection duration only harms historians.
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> and only applying to "business logic"
One person's business is another's platform.
There can never be a sane intellectual property law, if by "sane" you mean reasonable and/or free from negative consequences.
Imagine you live in the star trek universe, and we have those replicator machines which will happily deliver as much of anything to you as you wish to get.
Now imagine trying to come up with some "sane property laws" to exclude people from using them. What would even be the point of trying? How would any such attempt be anything more than arbitrarily giving one class of people unjustifiable power over another class of people?
We are actually in that very position with the fruits of intellectual labor. Just because one person is using a program, or an algorithm, or a theorem, that doesn't prevent anybody else from also using it.
So any mechanism for prohibiting somebody from using a program--which is to say, any mechanism to turn a program into property--is going to be globally suboptimal. It is going to arbitrarily harm one class of people so that another class of people can benefit.
The genius of the GPL is that it it gets this. The miracle of the GPL is that has found a way to give us something like a replicator machine even in this ultra-capitalistic society.
Yeah, copyleft has always been just a hack to cope with the current legal framework