I write scientific articles for a living and i dont give a fuck about some corporation making money off of them. What I do care is whether people can access my articles in other ways too, that’s why they are on Arxiv and ill email them if somebody asks.
If somebody wants to pay for a printed copy or an Elsevier typeset that doesnt concern me in the slightest. And I dont think it would any other author either if they had a decent income like i do from the uni
The first example was a company, and the second example I assume was done under a book deal, so a company.
Good night
IP only protects companies for some reason
IP only protects those who have the means to defend their IP in court, which is rich people and companies.
A big company can take that book, print it and sell it without you seeing a dime
Sure. I don't think that is theft.
As a consumer, you can download the book, listen to a free audiobook, or print it yourself if you want to. The company only gets money if they somehow make better physical version than what others have access to.
To me this is not at all akin to ownership or theft.
Yeah but you can't really profit off of that because anybody can print the book. And if there's no IP, I can just download the book and print it myself. Or read it as a PDF. Or download the IP-free audiobook and listen to that. Even for printed books, competition drives the price to the production costs so very little profit is being made there.
Otherwise big companies would be making big money off of shakespeare and the bible. But that's not how they make their money, they make their money with IP monopolies instead.
Without IP the company would also get approximately 0 money for selling movies or books. This hypothetical doesn't make sense.
How can you steal something that you can't own?
There are studies on this, smoking impairs your driving a lot less than drinking. But it's not good to drive while high, to be clear...
Bringing a person into existence for your own entertainment is the ultimate form of pointless hedonism
I am against the death penalty out of principle, not practical reasons. It goes fundamentally against rehabilitation, its effect differs from person to person drastically, it's just weird and vengeful. And making exceptions for edge cases is not good for a justice system.
So what if you do this instead: consistently enforce, say, 10 year prison sentences for murder as a CEO. This kind of stuff would stop overnight. But that doesn't happen unfortunately.
What does that mean in practice?
I appreciate the comment. Seeing that a system of publishing can work without authors being paid via IP does make a difference. In the short term abolishing IP laws might be bad, but we could replace it with something better, like a UBI, grants for authors, crowdsourcing, and other sources of funding.
And to be clear, we are not living under a UBI. Academics notoriously have to fight over the limited funds that are available to them. Some do need to find other work. Still, nobody is really advocating for an IP-based model. Because it's not better.
This one I don't agree with at all. The journals only exist because they can force people and institutions to pay money to get the articles. They would collapse without IP laws. Their power is already decaying due to Arxiv and sci-hub.