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Game Patents Need To Die (www.youtube.com)
submitted 8 months ago by to c/games@sh.itjust.works
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[–] 27 points 8 months ago (2 children)

IP laws are meant to protect creators, but are backdoored by corporate personhood. Remove corporate personhood and the world of IP law immediately becomes less toxic.

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    This is objectively false. The propaganda of IP is that it is designed to protect the little guy. History shows that this was never the case as copyright was always a tool of censorship and control.

    The patent system has been twisted beyond the breaking point since before I was born. It does not exist for its intended purpose anymore and instead is a legal arms race between corporations and governments.

    Trademark law has also been leveraged by monopolists. Although arguably its purpose makes the most sense being a commercial protection used exclusively against other commercial entities. It too has been abused regularly.

    The average copyright court case is around $250,000+ from begging to conclusions in the federal courts. Asserting or defending your rights is insanely expensive.

    Many innovators and developers have been litigated out of existence by not being able to pay to defend themselves in the case of patent trolls.

    IP is for the wealthy and their favorite proxy the corporation to create artificial scarcity. They have authored a regulation empire to commercialize our culture. They act as gatekeepers to our thoughts and creations. It really is a bizarre system.

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    The problem is the imbalance, not the idea of protection. We don't jump to laissez faire legislation because regulatory capture exists. It makes good sense to give legal rights to individual creators for their works so they can choose whether to seek to monetize them or make them freely available, at least until their death. If you wrote a book/song/program/etc. I want you to have the authority to make that determination for your creation, and in a system of person vs person, while it's not a given that both people would enter litigation as equals, it would at least be more likely than when one of the 'people' is a multi-million dollar VC-funded company. If companies have no personhood, they cannot own IP from creation to the end of the universe. No corp personhood would also limit their ability in many jurisdictions to enact lobbying, regulatory capture, and various other chicanery. I'm not saying it'd be easy but it would be effective and a solid step in the right direction, where eliminating IP would only enable further corporate abuse.

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago (1 child)

    I think the advent of AI really highlights that we are finally on a post artificial scarcity trajectory. Corporations and the government have almost completely stopped caring about IP enforcement in the quest for AI.

    The system you describe sounds somewhat reasonable. I was just pointing out it never existed in the first place. It is a compelling fantasy put forth by IP Maximalist to justify their rent seeking behavior. Making that fantasy a reality is probably possible in a non-fascist society.

    I am a bit confused by the last part where without an IP system corporations would be allowed to abuse artists. That is literally what they do everyday with the current laws with AI being their ultimate fuck you to artists. I suppose part of the issue is these laws have been exclusively written by corporations to benefit corporations.

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago

    Yep. It'd be a massive improvement to see artists getting an iota of the deference the courts show to large corporations.

    To make the last part clearer, the state we have now effectively is the 'no IP' state, but as created by uneven enforcement. Per the letter of the law, companies are supposed to pay for the IP they use, including, somehow, AI derivatives. Things are bad enough but dumping IP entirely would mean there wasn't even those ostensible protections. It'd be some Libertarian's fantasy I don't want to be anywhere near.

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