The birthrates in the home countries of those immigrants are plummeting…

You forgot: “we could try to build it a half decent sandbox but then our gizmo wouldn’t escape anymore, and we prefer to look incompetent rather than giving up the headlines.”

You have drank so much koolaid that you think you’re not a working class creator, you’re a temporarily embarrassed Taylor Swift.

The accumulation, gatekeeping, and rent extraction is the point of the system, and if you think it’s a system that’s made to protect the little guy, just look around yourself.

I can’t stop you from doing anything else with it. I can’t stop you from burning it, eating it, fucking it, shooting it, or using it as a door stop. I only have the power to prevent you from redistributing it.

But you can stop me. Because copyright law legally protects any DRM you want to place over that, and breaking it is copyright infringement regardless of the final purpose of it. And “noone will know if I don’t distribute it” is not an answer.

Sure. You say that like it’s a bad thing, but that’s why inventors can do what they do and survive.

No, like I said, I believe it should exist, I just believe it should be reduced significantly.

I’m an inventor. If I didn’t have my patent, Google could just come and take my idea, build their own version, and undercut me. Isn’t that a worse monopoly? As it stands, if Google wants to sell my product, they have to buy my patent. That’s a great system that protects small inventors like me.

Good for you. You’ll offer me a beer when you make your first billion. But you won’t.

The IP system is part of the reason why the tech sector is now so consolidated. Your patent would have been a lot more valuable in a more competitive world.

Correct. The states invented them because of a problem.

So, intellectual property is not like “normal” property of limited physical goods. We finally agree on something.

I should be able to profit off of my works for my entire life. Arguably, my heirs should be able to benefit from my works too. If I don’t have a fortune to give them, because I’m not a capitalist pig, at least they can benefit from my hard work.

My father worked in a factory his entire life. How come I don’t get continuous revenue from his work, but you expect your heirs to?

You want multi-generational profit from work you are completely done with. You actually are a capitalist pig, you’re just a less successful one.

copyright being automatic is necessary to prevent the system from being abused even more.

A 90 year automatic copyright means that the overwhelming majority of works produced in the last 100 years are orphan works. Stuff which you can’t use, but you can’t even tell who, if anyone, still has the copyright. The combination of a shorter automatic term with a registration-based extension would solve that.

You’ve clearly never been through the patent process. They went over my patent with a fine toothed comb. I went through three rounds of revision and had to take an entire section of claims out (because it might have been too close to an existing patent, which I thought was ridiculous, but whatever). I spoke with the patent examiner who absolutely had read my entire application and understood it very well.

Yeah, I am not in the US, but I do read US patents on a regular basis. While I can only speak for my field, I see the kind if crap that the USPO passes as if it’s valid, and it’s quite frankly embarrassing. Yes, an existing patent can be a hurdle. But the fact that the invention is totally trivial to a person “trained in the art” or even already published, does not seem to be a problem.

Very often US patents can’t be converted into patents into other jurisdictions, or half the claims gets struck down.

And I have seen the exact same (trivial) invention patented twice by different companies, because the stated purpose of it was slightly different. A fictional difference as in practice both products are exactly interchangeable and do the same work.

And let’s not even get into the whole nonsense of gene patenting.

But no problem here, let’s patent physical laws next.

Just because you don’t like Disney doesn’t mean that copyright laws are broken. Yeah, Disney kinda sucks lately.

It’s not just Disney. It’s everything and everyone. Nintendo? Sega? Are Alien sequels being made because they are such great ideas or because it’s profitable to milk the IPs?

It’s just too easy for them to extract value from existing IPs, to be bothered with putting the same money into new stuff.

If you don’t like giving to the creators whose work you are building on, just come up with your own ideas. Tons of artists use their own original content.

Lol, just say you have no idea how jazz works, or that you don’t like this kind of degenerate art. You’ll be in good company.

And jazz is just an example of the kind of “remix art” that have been fundamental to cultural development of the 20th century.

I do own my copyrighted material. You own a copy. You can’t redistribute it (without my permission), because I own the copyright.

So you have a right over my copy, and you can decide what I do with it. That’s what I said. You are the sole person to have the right to produce copies. There’s a word for that, it’s a monopoly.

And since your material can, materially, be copied, copyright only exists as enforced by the state. It’s a state enforced private monopoly. And so are patents.

And these didn’t exist until the states introduced them. This is pretty factual.

We cannot agree. It’s not gotten out of hand.

So you think that at automatic, untraceable term of 90 years if perfectly reasonable?

You think that the ability by large corporations of amassing and gatekeeping (no derivative work without their permission) 100 years of human culture is just fine? The ability to keep under control works that they are not even distributing, which then means that these can’t even be read, listened or watched… This is all fine?

You like how the US patent systems grants a patent without any real examination for basically anything that written in English, no matter how ridiculous?

You love the endless cultural slop milking the same damn IPs for nostalgia?

It pleases you that every artist who records a version of “my favourite things” (or any other jazz standards) ends up giving 90% of the proceeds to the heirs of the same two dead white dudes? Or how sampling basically destroys the revenue potential of a new song because the author of the sample is going to eat up the work of new artists?

You think your viral video wouldn’t have been adequately protected with, say, a 30 year term? You think 5 years in jail for a private copy of a blue ray is good and proportional?

Because it does violate our copyrights.

Apparently it often doesn’t. Courts have already ruled on this. When the billionaires do it, it’s fair use.

there are plenty of fallacious arguments for freedom, some of which are based on conspiratorial thinking.

There are arguments for freedom based on conservativism. Ancaps also exist. Plus fascists love freedom. Their freedom, and a reeducation camp for you.

And plenty of left-wing activism tries to leverage the state to protect minorities.

What I’m really saying is that it’s not so one dimensional as lefty freedom vs right bootlicking. You want a nice example?

http://dklevine.com/general/intellectual/against.htm

This actual economics book on intellectual property, which advocates for a downsizing of IP rights (both copyright and patents) and is greatly supportive of open source. It was written two decades ago by a couple of relatively conservative Chicago neoliberal economists.

I highly recommend it BTW, there’s very good factual research that more people should be aware of, and high quality discussion. But a lot of the arguments are based on market capitalist principles.

I don’t know where the balance is or should be between solidarity and rejecting intolerance.

I don’t think anyone can tell you for sure. It’s a difficult balance that needs to be constantly negotiated (even just within yourself). Very very often doing good requires evaluating trade-offs between values that are desirable but (to some extent) incompatible.

True, and I have to admit I went off on a tangent, because I hear the other argument, the normative one, all too often.

I exactly said that I don’t want the abolition of IP. I quote from my own comment:

I don’t want to argue that intellectual property should be abolished, I’m not convinced that that would be beneficial.

What is your problem again?

Copyright law isn’t just a two states exists/doesn’t exist kind of thing.

While it exists it can be good or written like ass in about 50 different dimensions.

No, they are not the only phone that lets yoy relock the bootloader.

They are the only phone to do that the proper way, while also including a TPM.

I would say that it’s often not the same computer.

We know for a fact that LLMs have been trained on all available open source codebases.

Do we know that there is a relevant amount of closed source code in the training data?

I’m constantly baffled by the copyright argument.

Intellectual property isn’t even real property (exclusive power over a thing), it’s a licensed monopoly enforced by the state, which gives the copyright owner power over many many things, present and future, not actually owned by them. Books that are in my house, software that is on your phone.

I don’t want to argue that intellectual property should be abolished, I’m not convinced that that would be beneficial. But I think we can all agree that the currently landscape of intellectual property legislation is utter nonsense, that it’s gotten completely out of hand, and that it mainly encourages concentration and gatekeeping.

So yes, the model producers have blatantly disregarded copyright, and have gotten away with it in ways which are not available to us peasants.

But we’re the copyleft people, we should be pointing at this and shouting that the emperor is finally naked, and that it’s time to curtail all that nonsense legislation once and for all, so that we can all be a little freer from the shackles of corporate monopoly.

And instead, we (the copyleft guys!) are just sitting here clutching our copyright pearls while muttering “but… But… Copyright! It violates the precious copyright!”.

Fascists and right wingers too?

There are features of Open Source that clearly appeal to several kinds of right wing brain.

In general the far right is also a counter-culture, that benefits from all the kinds of freedoms that the left does.

You want privacy so government doesn’t come for the immigrants, they want privacy so the government doesn’t come for their guns.

You want encryption so the corpos don’t see you unionizing, they want encryption so the cops don’t see them organizing a coup.

You want free speech because information on gender and orientation is not scandalous and dangerous, they want free speech to discuss the proper place of brown people.

You don’t want to use mainstream tech because it’s awful, exploitative and plutocratic, they don’t want to use it because it’s clearly an arm of the jewish deep state.

And let’s not even get into the whole crypto thing. Largely open source, but largely appealing to ancaps and other such funny beasts.

You’ll find plenty of bigots and conspiracy theorists in unions, too.

Yes but the conspiracies tend to be different.

You say that as if we don’t continually discover right wingers, fascists, religious bigots, and conspiracy theorists within the community.

What’s an electromagnetic microscope simulator? For reference, I work in electron optics.

Because other jurisdictions have mo such scanning?

As far as I recall not the US, and definitely not China, so the more appealing alternatives may be some smaller country.

Indeed, laptops and even more so power banks, strike me as some of the least BIFL products in existence. Only Smartphones and wireless a earbuds might be worse.

If the child is amenable, a used thinkpad with Linux will keep running smoothly basically forever, take a beating, and be serviceable.

And get them in all kind of arguments over office formats.

Out of the frying pan straight into another frying pan a wok

Well, not quite.

Chat Control’s point was to prevent the material from circulating after it’s been produced.

Even even our zealous pencil pushers are not quite that dense.

Meh. I would say that if anything deserves an exception, it’s ereaders.

Im my wife’s kindle PW I can replace the battery, and have done that.

But there are simply no new batteries for that kind of device to be found. So then the new battery lasts 20% longer than the old one, and maybe added a year to the device’s life.

Replaceable battery isn’t worth much if you don’t have a reason to believe you’ll be able to source a good one a decade from now.

As I wrote above, noone where I work would blink for that kind of stuff, but I guess that doepends on the local culture.

I have looked and couldn’t find the F-Droid definition of NSFW.

But I’ve read bits of the discussion and the whole thing was kinda nuts. By my criterion I’d let the Bible pass, but the way all those people jumped to “So ArE yOu BaNnInG tHe QuRaN aS wElL??!!?” was really embarassing.