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.”
So delete all pharmaceutical IP to make drugs accessible to everyone and save taxpayers trillions?
“Noooo, not like that!”
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.
In the US the tax payer subsidizes almost all drug research. Between 2010 and 2019 the NIH spent $184 Billion on all but 2 drugs approved by the FDA.
It worked out to about $1.5 Billion for each R&D product with a novel target and about $600 mill for each R&D product with multiple targets.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10148199/
Or
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama-health-forum/fullarticle/2804378
The cost to develop each drug is between about $1 and $2.5 Billion
I’m not sure how much is subsidized outside of NIH but I’d imagine other countries are doing the same.
Why should companies own the whole IP or perhaps why should they have any ownership if most of the funding is from the public?
idk i think our incentive should be to cure diseases with public funding and make people healthy instead of for profit but what do i know
Companies will not — ever — dump hundreds of millions/billions into developing a drug only to have it be sold at cost or even worse, completely losing out on it when a competitor sells a copy of it at a price you can’t match.
And even if they did suddenly turn to altruism like that, they’d very quickly go bankrupt.
Why would anybody spend billions making new drugs if they knew with 100% certainty that they’d never make the money back?
We may not like it, but that’s the system that we have. Some form of IP law should exist to encourage these companies to continue putting out medicines that better our lives, it’s just that our current ones go way too far.
We already fund the research of new drugs almost entirely through publicly funded projects which then HAND OVER the patent rights to whichever company has the most former board members in the executive branch at the time.
I watched it happen in real time during covid while working for the DPH. Those companies produce NOTHING. They are the literal obstacle to creating new medicines and making them widely available.
I’m against the context of the main post but putting on a cape for medical patents is wild. The entirety of healthcare in america is inexcusable. Let’s stay focused on the AI tech oligarchs robbing us of our futures and attempting to frame it as a concern with intellectual property.
If you only funded drugs through public funding, that means the government has a say in what drugs get funded and which don’t, meaning any and all drugs that don’t affect the broadest number of people simply won’t get funded.
Drugs will no longer be for all people, it’ll be strictly the people that vote for the government in charge. So… No hormone treatments, no birth control, no vaccines, no aids research, nothing that doesn’t explicitly align with the government.
First of all, governments already do fund all the research.
Even in your hypothetical, thats just one government. It doesn’t stop medical advancement entirely just because one dictatorship stops funding research. It moves elsewhere. When nazi germany declared that nobody would receive funding for anything outside of Aryan research ^tm the scientists just left to a country that wasn’t barbarically stupid.
Also, everything in your final paragraph is stuff that is happening now, in america, under the capitalist organization of the economy which gives all the rights to a private company after publicly funding the research and development of their drugs. It makes no difference, save the fact that now the authoritarian government in power has consolidated billions of dollars for rich capitalists who will gladly accept the orders to no longer produce those medicines while remaining disgustingly wealthy.
Even if you believe in the delusional idea that private companies are funding the development of novel treatments entirely on their own the fact remains that drugs are currently, as we speak, not for all people. I am pointing out the solution to that problem, and the response was to point out how, if we did what I said, then what’s already happening now would be the consequence.
Except no, they don’t.
If it’s state funded then that’s obviously a different matter.
But usually it’s a company making drugs, and they’d go bust if they spent billions developing a drug and got zero money back. Then there would be far fewer drugs made.
Be practical. Letting people die for ideological reasons is not a good thing.
How, when more companies would be able to develop the same drug? And they don’t develop drugs, they develop ways to extend their patents.
More companies will develop that drug.
But think of it this way. You’re the CEO of a pharmaceutical company that makes drugs, vaccines, etc that saves lives. You do this for a profit.
You’re presented with a plan to make a drug that, idk, lessens the symptoms of Crohn’s Disease. It’ll cost $2 billion to create and bring to market.
After it’s done being created, and the drug spends 10+ years in clinical testing, it’s on shelves. You have to price each box at $10 in order to break even after 5 years, so you do so.
But the law has changed, now anybody can manufacture the drug. A competitor who didn’t foot any of the development costs or do any of the hard work is selling each box at $0.80. you can’t compete with that, you make an enormous loss and your company edges closer to bankruptcy.
One of your workers comes to you with plans for a $2bn project that will hopefully reduce migraines. Given lessons learned from the previous example, do you go ahead with the plan? Will the board even let you?
I agree that IP laws in the sector need to be pared down, but scrapping them entirely would prevent any company from creating new drugs, as they’d be absolutely certain they wouldn’t be able to recoup development and regulatory hurdle costs.
In an ideal world, all drugs would be made by governments, for a loss, and open sourced, so the market could compete on price. But that’s not the world we live in.
I wrote a long winded reply but honestly I’ll just say that your second paragraph is entirely based on fiction and your final paragraph is precisely what for profit medicine is designed to do. Profit is a purely ideological drive, medicine and healthcare do not need profits to exist. The post office does not need to make money. It exists because we HAVE to have it.
You can go see for yourself. Moderna did not single handedly make the covid vaccine. They do not and should not have the right to deny anyone the right to produce it as cheaply as necessary to provide it to their populations. I can go deeper if you want but if this doesn’t show you that we are saying the same thing I’m going to have doubts about this being in good faith.
It’s not fiction, that’s the reality.
Profit is a purely ideological drive, medicine and healthcare do not need profits to exist.
No shit. Everyone knows that. But it does exist. That’s the world we live in. Income tax doesn’t need to exist, but it does, and things would go wrong if you suddenly stopped paying it.
Moderna did not single handedly make the covid vaccine
Who said they did? Many companies did, and some had government or university help.
I can go deeper if you want
Go as deep as you like. I’ve already explained the situation, though.
I am speaking in good faith. How do you go about avoiding companies simply refusing to create new medications when they know for a fact making new ones would cost billions and they’d never get the money back?
I don’t like that that’s the situation. I want companies to make medications and sell them at a loss, but that’s a fantasy world. I’m being pragmatic. We can improve IP laws without completely killing off future medicine development.
“Just, like, don’t make profit, broooo” would be nice, but that’s not how the world works.
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.
That’s what would happen if copyright doesn’t exist. If a company releases something, it’s immediately public domain, because no law protects it.
GPL
The GPL is very much not the public domain.
The GPL is basically trying to make a world without copyright. The GPL basically only has teeth in a world where copyright exists. If copyright didn’t exist then everything would be in the public domain and the GPL would be toothless, but that’s fine because it would no longer be unnecessary.
No, the GPL very much requires copyright to work. The whole point is copyleft, which obligates changes to the code remain under the same license and be available to everyone.
Without copyright, companies just wouldn’t share their changes at all. The whole TIVO-ization clause in the GPL v3 would be irrelevant since TIVO can very much take without giving back. Copyright is very much essential to the whole concept of the GPL working.
Just think, why would anyone want to use Linux if Microsoft or Apple could just bake Linux into their offering?
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?
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.
Talking about “IP” as if it were a single thing confuses any debate. Copyright is not a patent, which is not a trademark - they do different things.
Software patents actually should be deleted. It is impractical to avoid accidentally infringing as there are multiple ways to describe the same system using totally different technical descriptions. Copyright for software was enough.
… Delete… all… IP law?
So… just literally make all piracy legal, switch all gaming and tv show and movie production/consumption… to an optional donation model?
Fuck it, why not.
I am both an avid pirate and have a degree in econ, wrote papers as an undergrad on how to potentially reform the DMCA… and uh yeah, at this point yeah no one has any fucking idea how any thing works, everyone is an idiot, sure fuck it, blow it all up, why not.
IP law does 3 things that are incredibly important… but have been basically irrelevant between roughly 1995-2023.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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?
How does genai make those concerns valid again?
Make yourself the question: how does genai respect these 3 boundaries set by IP law? All providers of Generative AI services should be forced by law to explicitly estate this.
I’m still not getting it. What does generative AI have to do with attribution? Like, at all.
I can train a model on a billion pictures from open, free sources that were specifically donated for that purpose and it’ll be able to generate realistic pictures of those things with infinite variation. Every time it generates an image it’s just using logic and RNG to come up with options.
Do we attribute the images to the RNG god or something? It doesn’t make sense that attribution come into play here.
I would like to take a crack at this. There is this recent trend going around with ghiblifying one’s picture. Its basically converting a picture into ghibli image. If you had trained it on free sources, this is not possible.
Internally an LLM works by having networks which activate based on certain signals. When you ask it a certain question. It creates a network of similar looking words and then gives it back to you. When u convert an image, you are doing something similar. You cannot form these networks and the threshold at which they activate without seeing copyrighted images from studio ghibli. There is no way in hell or heaven for that to happen.
OpenAI trained their models on pirated things just like meta did. So when an AI produces an image in style of something, it should attribute the person from which it actually took it. Thats not whats happening. Instead it just makes more money for the thief.
If you hired someone to copy Ghibli’s style, then fed that into an AI as training data, it would completely negate your entire argument.
It is not illegal for an artist to copy someone else’s style. They can’t copy another artist’s work—that’s a derivative—but copying their style is perfectly legal. You can’t copyright a style.
All of that is irrelevant, however. The argument is that—somehow—training an AI with anything is somehow a violation of copyright. It is not. It is absolutely 100% not a violation of copyright to do that!
Copyright is all about distribution rights. Anyone can download whatever TF they want and they’re not violating anyone’s copyright. It’s the entity that sent the person the copyright that violated the law. Therefore, Meta, OpenAI, et al can host enormous libraries of copyrighted data in their data centers and use that to train their AI. It’s not illegal at all.
When some AI model produces a work that’s so similar to an original work that anyone would recognize it, “yeah, that’s from Spirited Away” then yes: They violated Ghibli’s copyright.
If the model produces an image of some random person in the style of Studio Ghibli that is not violating anyone’s copyright. It is not illegal nor is it immoral. No one is deprived of anything in such a transaction.
I think your understanding of generative AI is incorrect. It’s not just “logic and RNG” It is using training data (read as both copyrighted and uncopyrighted material) to come up with a model of “correctness” or “expectedness”. If you then give it a pattern, (read as question or prompt) it checks its “expectedness” model for whatever should come next. If you ask it “how many cups in a pint” it will check the most common thing it has seen after that exact string of words it in its training data: 2. If you ask for a picture of something “in the style of van gogh”, it will spit out something with thick paint and swirls, as those are the characteristics of the pictures in its training data that have been tagged with “Van Gogh”. These responses are not brand new, they are merely a representation of the training data that would most work as a response to your request. In this case, if any of the training data is copyrighted, then attribution must be given, or at the very least permission to use this data must be given by the current copyright holder.
I think your understanding of generative AI is incorrect. It’s not just “logic and RNG”…
If it runs on a computer, it’s literally “just logic and RNG”. It’s all transistors, memory, and an RNG.
The data used to train an AI model is copyrighted. It’s impossible for something to exist without copyright (in the past 100 years). Even public domain works had copyright at some point.
if any of the training data is copyrighted, then attribution must be given, or at the very least permission to use this data must be given by the current copyright holder.
This is not correct. Every artist ever has been trained with copyrighted works, yet they don’t have to recite every single picture they’ve seen or book they’ve ever read whenever they produce something.
If it runs on a computer, it’s literally “just logic and RNG”. It’s all transistors, memory, and an RNG.
Sure, but this is a bad faith argument. You can say this about anything. Everything is made up of other stuff, it’s what someone has done to combine or use those elements that matters. You could extend this to anything proprietary. Manufacturing equipment is just a handful of metals, rubbers, and plastics. However, the context in which someone uses those materials is what matters when determining if copyright laws have been broken.
The data used to train an AI model is copyrighted. It’s impossible for something to exist without copyright (in the past 100 years). Even public domain works had copyright at some point.
If the data used to train the model was copyrighted data acquired without explicit permission from the data owners, it itself cannot be copyrighted. You can’t take something copyrighted by someone else, put it in a group of stuff that is also copyrighted by others, and claim you have some form of ownership over that collection of works.
This is not correct. Every artist ever has been trained with copyrighted works, yet they don’t have to recite every single picture they’ve seen or book they’ve ever read whenever they produce something.
You speak confidently, but I don’t think you understand the problem area enough to act as an authority on the topic.
Laws can be different for individuals and companies. Hell, laws of use can be different for two different individuals, and the copyright owner actually gets a say in how their thing can be used by different groups of people. For instance, for a 3d art software, students can use it for free. However, their use agreement is that they cannot profit off of anything they make. Non students have to pay, but can sell their work without consequences. Companies have to pay even more, but often times get bulk discounts if they are buying licenses for their whole team.
Artists have something of value: AI training data. We know this is valuable to AI training companies, because artists are getting reached out to by AI companies, asking to sell them the rights to train their model on their data. If AI companies just use an artist’s AI training data without their permission, it’s stealing the potential revenue they could have made selling it to a different AI company. Taking away revenue potential on someone’s work is the basis for having violated copyright/fair use laws.
This would be disastrous for actual manufacturing because a patent is the only thing that makes it worthwhile to spend a bunch of money upfront to develop a new technology. Unlike with software where you don’t have nearly as much up front capital investment to develop something, it costs millions of dollars to get a manufacturing process up and running and in a good enough state to where it can actually work out financially. Without patents, your competitor can just take all of that work and investment and just copy it with the benefit of doing it right the first time, so they’re able to undercut you on cost. The alternative is that everyone is super secretive about what they’re doing and no knowledge is shared, which is even worse. Patents are an awesome solution to this problem because they are public documents that explain how technologies work, but the law allows a monopoly on that technology for a limited amount of time. I also feel that in the current landscape, copyright is probably also good (although I would prefer it to be more limited) because I don’t want people who are actually coming up with new ideas having to compete with thousands of AI slop copycats ruining the market.
TL;DR- patents are good if you’re actually building things, tech bros are morons who think everything is software.
Patent documents are rarely useful because they’re kept as general and opaque as possible to cover as many innovations as possible. I agree that it’s important to protect manufacturing, but patents are not the right way to go about it for at least two reasons: (1) they block innovation by design (e-ink screens are great examples) and (2) they create a huge barrier to entry for new ideas (think about how many lawyers are making a living on this) I disagree with the senders on so many things. But patents were invented in a world of monarchies and craftsmen. Time to go!
Patents would be fine if the bar for “innovation” would be much higher, software patents weren’t a thing, there was way more research done into prior art, and there would be different (shorter) lengths for patents depending on what industry they target.
Like, if it’s manufacturing or something like drugs where it takes years before you can start making profit, sure, make them 10-20 years. If it’ something you make money off of immediately, it should be shorter.
I actually agree that the patent system could be improved a lot. Not all things are bad about it.
What do you mean with “innovation”? How would that be defined?
Protecting innovative stuff is literally the point of patents and why the system exists. Anything “new” is by definition innovation, except the bar is really low currently, with very little research being done into prior art.
Patented stuff should be non-obvious, and not a simple derivative of existing stuff (i.e. when there are square buttons and circle buttons you shouldn’t be able to patent a button that has 2 corners square and 2 circle just because it’s “novel” because it’s just a very simple and logical step).
So basically, make the bar for a patent much higher, and require some proof into the research of prior art and explaining why/how your patent is different.
Also, patents should expire early/not be renewable if you don’t actually use them (so move a certain number of units / generate some amount of revenue using your patents). So you couldn’t patent random BS in the hopes someone else will break your patent by accident.
Or even better, just outright punish patent trolls.
Patent documents are rarely useful because they’re kept as general and opaque as possible to cover as many innovations as possible.
I think this is a problem that can be fixed inside of patent system. Make it so by the end of patent life there is “how to build production line of this” manual.
I’m fully in favour of abolishing IP law for everyone, ideally globally.
Public domain everything.
I suspect that isn’t the picture these two have in mind. It’s going to be the same as Musk’s demand for free speech, which just turns out to mean “let me be an asshole and you’re not allowed to complain.” This one is going to be “I get to profit off your ideas, but you’re not allowed to use mine.”
That would just ensure that no one ever commits resources to developing something new…
It’ll affect it, but it won’t stop it. This is a good question to bring up though.
I design medical devices. IP is incredibly important in this process to protect our R&D investment in the current system. If IP didn’t exist, we’d protect that through other means like obfuscation of function.
Also if IP didn’t exist, I could design devices that are so much better at healing people. So much of what I do is restricted because someone else has 30 years left on what they patented.
R&D is expensive. Just because you see what someone else did, doesn’t mean you can easily replicate it.
In short: if your goal is pure profit, yeah removing IP probably hurts this a little. If your goal is producing the best product, then get rid of it.
I think the best solution would be a much shorter exclusionary period for patents.
So much of what I do is restricted because someone else has 30 years left on what they patented.
If they didn’t patent it, that technology never would have existed in the first place for you to steal from.
I think the best solution would be a much shorter exclusionary period for patents.
100% agreed on that account.
In short: if your goal is pure profit, yeah removing IP probably hurts this a little
“A little”? If there’s no IP you just pay a janitor or an employee a million bucks to send you all the information and documentation and you manufacture the product yourself and undercut the company actually engineering the product so they can never be profitable.
Like, this all seems very obvious to me…
that technology never would have existed in the first place
Oh gee, a wildly incorrect assumption
Oh gee, a rational contradiction supported with evidence.
Capital finally taking the market out behind the barn.
IP law is used to reinforce capital tho??
Yes. It’s attacking its own institutions. Strange, isn’t it?
