This is the "Creativity Without Law: Challenging the Assumptions of Intellectual Property" essay collection edited by Kate Darling and Aaron Perzanowski.

It's so fucking cool/weird to open up a book of essays about copyright law and see some Twitter mutuals in there, not to mention one of the editors. Hello!

I'm sure we're implicated throughout, but there's no index entry for the humble Plagiarists. How sad.

Of course, it begins by laying the groundwork on conventional justification of copyright and such. And it's doing so ably for a book that's about to probe them deeply.

But the conventional justifications of copyright are so fucking weird, y'all.

There's no JUSTIFYING. There's No Difference between labor and personality theories because they both reduce to money. Why do Only "creative" laborers get a government program "trying"(?) to get them paid? Why are people who sell goods for what they Actually Cost "unscrupulous?"

I also anticipate this book will examine (and probably praise) the self-government of creative industries wrt copying norms. I'd like to examine that, too. Self-government isn't good if the norms are MORE AUTHORITARIAN than anti-copying laws already are. Why "govern" expression?

The thesis will be that uniform IP regimes are unfit to regulate the messy realities of creative life. I think that's wrong.

Abolition of the copyright system entirely would be an extremely beneficial uniform policy.

Criminalizing anti-copying norms perhaps more so. #EssayIdeas

"You cannot copy my work" is a WAY easier signal to detect than "You have inappropriately copied my work" and a WAY more direct harm. A legal regime could abolish anti-copying norms within a generation, but we'll waste that time on "reform" toward an "equitable" copyright system.

Copyright is like the government stepping in to decree and enforce that you must accept that Bitcoin is a currency. Not just that, it creates and enforces that, yes, you must speak of people who have lots of Bitcoin as though they're intelligent, productive members of society.

The only defining feature of a norms-based intellectual property system is that incumbents exercise the power to discriminate, rather than consumers.

(In a law-based system, the judge has perverse incentives in favor of capital, but the judge is still a consumer.)

All norms-based IP systems will bend to suit the whims of incumbents, so they should be treated with the same level of respect we should show to, say, Amazon lobbying against unions. Everything they say in favor of the status quo is a front for maintaining unaccountable power.

Professional cooking spotlights the lie at the heart of all IP systems. French chefs cultivate a cultural meme that says the reason French chefs are more innovative is literally because they RESTRICT innovation. They punish copying, making them "more creative."

Bullshit.

At least when ethnic groups promote misguided IP norms, they do it in the name of (again, Misguided) things like guarding their culture from actual historical oppressors.

It wouldn't make sense to "protect" Maori tattoos in the name of making the tattoos more creative. It's literally about preventing outside influences, restricting creativity in the name of cultural purity and continuity. Which is silly. But it's more honest than French chefs.

When chefs say that recipe exclusivity is of "great economic importance to accomplished chefs," they're literally saying that chefs who already have kitchens/businesses have more right to cook the best food than chefs without those things. Even if new chefs can cook it just fine.

This should be repulsive to us. It's just an argument that owning things makes you more of a person than people who don't own things. And they're not even things. They're ideas that people want to eat. If you can cook it well enough, you should be allowed to sell it.

There's a compelling social interest in busting the French chefs' cartel. It artificially limits competition and imposes a tax on consumers that is of literally negative benefit to them. The tax revenue goes towards arguing this barbaric practice makes sense. It's a copywrong.

It's frustrating to read people talk about norms against spreading information. If IP regimes are for anything, they're for spreading information. A regime that does not do that is invalid.

"What about trade secrets?"

What ABOUT trade secrets? Fake regime. Harms the public.

This says that French chefs often exchange secret information in the hopes of profiting from cooperation. It's been compared to a prisoner's dilemma, where cooperation is always the most profitable long-term strategy.

OK. So we should force them to reveal all their recipes.

Who, exactly, is the warden in the French chefs' prisoner's dilemma? The French chefs.

They're not setting this up for our benefit. They're doing it to profit at our expense, and to insulate any professional position they have against better chefs. It's ridiculous.

Why do we only care about "free riders" when "free riders" means people who copy others, a harmless activity?

What about the "free riders" who were already in positions of power and stood to gain the most from expanded IP regimes? They free ride on state violence.

If someone were to violate an important norm, "...my esteem for the guy becomes very low. I think the chef has no self-esteem, and does not respect the code of honor."

"Norms-based IP is Just Discrimination" (consider "Just Hate Crimes") #EssayIdeas

Every single one of these points was created only to make incumbents feel special and comfortable while atop the pyramid. This is some "white fountain/black fountain" copium shit. They're afraid of being overtaken by better chefs, so they create norms to waste other chefs' time.

lol, this paper points out that only ~5% of copyright cases actually go to trial on their merits due to trials' expensiveness. It contrasts that with a chef plagiarism scandal "resolved" in 5 days. Due process? The examples suggest it was 5 days of inceptivists taking the piss.

Have to ask again—why are consumers expected to have an investment in enforcing norms-based IP? All that should matter to a restaurant customer are cost and the food's function. Why should they be expected to go to another country to eat food that could be prepared anywhere?

Consumers DON'T have an interest in enforcing norms-based IP. It's not for their benefit. The reason they feel urges to act against plagiarism is because academics indoctrinate impressionable children into equating academic norms-based IP with morality

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3638700

I object to the characterization of norms-based IP as incapable of levying economic sanctions. Plagiarists' careers are destroyed by norms-based IP. OF COURSE that's an economic sanction. It doesn't just Not Count because the inceptivist doesn't get free money for no labor.

If people so consistently misunderstand the rule, maybe the rule is bad and counter-intuitive.

It would be 1000x easier to teach people that information is free—that IP makes no sense—than it is to first teach people IP is real and then explain all the regimes' rules.

It's interesting that cocktail trademarks suits are (ostensibly) brought on consumers' behalf. Seems to me like requiring Bacardi cocktails to contain Bacardi artificially freezes drinking culture in a way Bacardi profits from. Do consumers benefit when culture freezes?

"Notably, this is not a complaint about piracy; it is about competition." Cocktails are a low IP environment where new creations are so encouraged that established players find the ease of market entry annoying.

This'd probably be true of everything currently restricted by IP.

Our culture will follow any trend lead by booze and sex to ruin, but we won't abolish the concept of intellectual property. Maybe that's because, when push comes to shove, we prioritize porn's copyright over beer's innovation.

It's weird how scientific history is pockmarked with assholes being assholes to other assholes over something as pointless as "credit." Or even "money."

If a scientist moans that they "deserve" something for an invention, ask them why they're not satisfied by saved lives.

Honestly, if a scientist's reply is "saved lives don't pay my bills," smite them on the spot. If our society is set up so you need money to live, it's wrong to think your job should determine how much money you get. They just want to join or remain in the bourgeois fold.

The debates over medical patenting in the 1800s were very reminiscent of FOSS principles today. Eventually, patenting won out because commercial interests colonized the space and ran out competition, much like Bill Gates colonized computing with closed-source software.

It's also interesting how pretty much the entire medical community came together to ignore the legal patent on ether anesthesia. They collectively determined it was illegitimate and just pirated it. Saved many lives, undoubtedly.

But pirating old, dusty books? "Villainy!"

"It is very plain that no good has come, or can come to [the progress of the healing art and the true character of the profession] from the patronage of the Patent-office." (1856)

"It is very plain that no good has come, or can come to the progress of the expressive arts and the true character of our humanity from the patronage of the Copyright Office." (2021)

The "user innovator" concept @KJStrandburg is talking about here is probably the same as @mckenziewark's "hacker" class.

It's always heart-breaking to read about failures to hold the line on open source principles in the 1950s, or somesuch. Solidly within living memory, so people we know got to live under a better system, but so long ago that everyone will pretend something better is impossible.

It doesn't matter if you have unanimity among the community and "bipartisan support" for an unambiguously good idea—like making medical procedures unpatentable. If there's an industry in opposition, their lobby will eke out a compromise that needlessly complicates our rules.

A big part of the reason that medicine became more amenable to patents comes down to a change in the bleeding-edge of the field—most invention is done in commercial labs, not by individuals. Moreover, it MUST BE done that way. I would distinguish it from software here.

Most non-surveillance, non-weapon code COULD HAVE been written without, say, Google existing. And a lot of corporate software is shitty, regardless. The norms in software still cut in favor of large companies existing because they want us to build surveillance and weapons.