this post was submitted on 13 Apr 2025
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Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter (now X) and Square (now Block), sparked a weekend’s worth of debate around intellectual property, patents, and copyright, with a characteristically terse post declaring, “delete all IP law.”

X’s current owner Elon Musk quickly replied, “I agree.”

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[–] HawlSera@lemm.ee 22 points 6 days ago

I mean, I'd like to get rid of IP Law too....

But I actually mean get rid of, not an "Under New Management" sense like Elon The Musky Husky wants

[–] orcrist@lemm.ee 15 points 6 days ago

Of course they are both lying. As with all capitalists, they will always use the law to seize greater power.

[–] OsrsNeedsF2P@lemmy.ml 12 points 6 days ago

That would be a-m-a-z-i-n-g. Private game servers, fan remakes of shows and movies, I would be over the moon.

Too bad it won't happen

[–] Blindsite@lemmy.today 9 points 6 days ago (1 children)

If they did could we use the Twitter bird or Tesla logo all we wanted? I mean yeah let's get rid of all IP law but get rid of it for everyone. If we want to copy a big corporation then yeah we should do that. Get rid of copyright and trademarks, woo! Publish all that hidden patented material so anyone can produce it. Let's get creative. You think big corps will get on board with all this?

I don't think Elon is that smart to realize what 'delete all IP laws' entails. He probably thinks it in the sense of an anarcho-capitalist.

Anarchy for me not for thee.

[–] selson@lemm.ee 3 points 6 days ago (1 children)

I’ve been on board with this for fucking years. Our IP system in the USA is so fucked. It’s like “death of the creator plus 40 years” or something and then Disney lobbies to increase it further to protect the mouse.

Let me make Mickey Mouse shirts and let me make money off of them!

Let me stream Nintendo games without a cease and desist!

[–] ArchRecord@lemm.ee 2 points 6 days ago

Not to mention the fact that the stronger IP law is, the more it's often used to exploit people.

Oh, did you as an artist get given stronger rights for your work? That platform you're posting on demands that you give them a license for any possible use, in exchange for posting your art there to get eyeballs on your work.

Did your patents just get stronger enforcement? Too bad it's conveniently very difficult to fund and develop any product at scale under that patent without needing outside investor funding into a new corporate entity that will own the patent, instead of you!

To loosely paraphrase from Cory Doctorow: If someone wants a stronger lock, but won't give you the key, then it's not for your benefit.

If corporations get to put locks on everything with keys they own, but also make it hard for you to get or enforce access to the keys to the locks on your stuff, then the simplest way to level the playing field is to simply eliminate the locks.

[–] HalfSalesman@lemm.ee 2 points 6 days ago

As much as I also would like IP law to die, I do not think that these two saying such means much.

Jack Dorsey is not in government and worth a 100th of what Musk is worth. And Elon Musk is evil and retarded.

[–] melsaskca@lemmy.ca 1 points 6 days ago

Wow. A white guy with money has an opinion. This is getting crazy! /s

[–] veeesix@lemmy.ca 432 points 1 week ago (3 children)

So delete all pharmaceutical IP to make drugs accessible to everyone and save taxpayers trillions?

[–] el_muerte@lemm.ee 193 points 1 week ago

"Noooo, not like that!"

[–] conditional_soup@lemm.ee 72 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (28 children)

This is why it's a mixed bag for me. IP law is kinda important in a capitalist system, which, for better or worse, that's what we have. If someone comes up with a wonder drug that outright cures addiction or something, you'd want that person to be able to recoup their costs before a bigger organization with more capital swoops in and undercuts them on production costs until they're the sole supplier of the drug. The hepatitis C cure drug selling for $70,000 is a great example of this quandary; there's millions of dollars worth of research and clinical trials that went into developing the drug, you'd want the company to be able to recuperate the costs of developing it or else there's less incentive to do something similar for other diseases down the line. Also, though, $70,000 or go fucking die is an outrageous statement.

Of course, what we have for IP law in practice is a bastardized monster, where corporations exploit the fuck out of it to have monopoly control over important products like insulins and life-saving medications that cost cents to produce and allow them to sell for hundreds a dose. That's not the intent of IP law, IMO, and that doesn't really serve anyone.

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[–] 9tr6gyp3@lemmy.world 153 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (18 children)

Do it., but also ensure that all work enters the public domain and is free for anyone to use, modify, commercialize, or basically whatever the GPL says.

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[–] Dekkia@this.doesnotcut.it 96 points 1 week ago (84 children)

I'm fully in favour of abolishing IP law for everyone, ideally globally.

Public domain everything.

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[–] kibiz0r@midwest.social 82 points 1 week ago (12 children)

IP law does 3 things that are incredibly important… but have been basically irrelevant between roughly 1995-2023.

  1. Accurate attribution. Knowing who actually made a thing is super important for the continued development of ideas, as well as just granting some dignity to the inventor/author/creator.
  2. Faithful reproduction. Historically, bootleg copies of things would often be abridged to save costs or modified to suit the politics of the bootlegger, but would still be sold under the original title. It’s important to know what the canonical original content is, if you’re going to judge it fairly and respond to it.
  3. Preventing bootleggers from outcompeting original creators through scale.

Digital technology made these irrelevant for a while, because search engines could easily answer #1, digital copies are usually exact copies so #2 was not an issue, and digital distribution made #3 (scale) much more balanced.

But then came AI. And suddenly all 3 of these concerns are valid again. And we’ve got a population who just spent the past 30 years living in a world where IP law had zero upsides and massive downsides.

There’s no question that IP law is due for an overhaul. The question is: will we remember that it ever did anything useful, or will we exchange one regime of fatcats fucking over culture for another one?

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[–] Naevermix@lemmy.world 73 points 1 week ago (1 children)

They don't want to delete all IP law, they just want to delete the IP law which is preventing them from postponing the collapse of the AI hype a little bit more.

[–] HawlSera@lemm.ee 2 points 6 days ago

If they wanted to delete ALL IP Law, I'd move to have my Sonic fanfiction officially published.

Sally Acorn's back in the canon if I say she is bro!

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