this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2025
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I disagree, because I think all of these things address the wrong problem.
Individuals should be able to gain from their own inventions, and others shouldn’t be able to force them into poverty by stealing their IP. Corporations especially should not be incentivised to do that.
Then again, unfettered capitalism is geared towards incentivising corporations to do that.
The answer isn’t to weaken people’s already vanishing IP, but to change what’s incentivised. Also to stop treating corporations as people. They aren’t.
IP protections are stronger than ever! If you write a novel and a company takes that without making a deal with you, almost any law firm will take that case with no payment until you get a massive settlement/judgement. You need to have evidence, of course, but IP is one thing the courts take very seriously.
Protecting IP is not an issue, the issue is the protections last way too long and are generally owned by corporations through employment contracts. I don't think that should be legal. Instead, you should only be allowed to grant your employer a perpetual, royalty-free license to use your work and perhaps a noncompete for some reasonable time after (i.e. can't license your work to specific competitors), and that agreement should be void if they terminate your contract unlawfully. The creator should always be able to use their creations for their own benefit.
But yeah, the real issue is incentives, and this dramatically changes incentives. Instead of a company like Disney milking their IPs for decades, they'll need to continue to innovate because they can't rely on courts to preserve their monopoly. Pokemon was created about 30 years ago and fans have continually complained about the state of the IP (games are samey and whatnot), so it's high time they have some competition with that IP. Likewise for so many other popular IPs that companies just sit on and milk and only innovate when that stops being profitable.
If you change the IP structure, you'll see a big shift in the creative market.