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It's not capitalism that prevents you from sharing the data project that you purchases for no marginal cost with others, it's intellectual property laws. Now if you get rid of those and let capitalism take it's course then you will almost certainly see less of these things invented but you're far from critiquing anything at the heart of capitalism.
What part of
makes it sound like I'm trying to strike at the heart of capitalism?
This sort of demonstrates my point about 'being allergic to the discussion', whenever you talk about this stuff people assume the old battle lines are in effect and that those must be the 'sides' we're arguing for.
Capitalism (well, free markets) is great in general, I'm just saying it doesn't deal with abundance well because it evolved to handle the distribution of scarce resources. You shouldn't expect it to handle the distribution of post-scarcity goods well, that's not a thing that even existed when it was being formed!
Like I said, capitalism's solution to post-need goods is to impose artificial scarcity; IP laws are one of the ways that this artificial scarcity gets imposed. The fact that without that imposition, capitalism can't incentivize the creation of those goods and they stop existing, is very much a part of my point: that capitalism doesn't have a good solution to this situation.
The real issue here is how to incentivize creation without artificial scarcity.
In theory, the makers of a great game don't care whether they make $50M and a million people play their game, or they make $50M and billion people play their game.
There must be some way for society to get them that $50M without telling those 999 million people they're not allowed to play it. We're not so stupid that this is physically impossible for us to accomplish.
We just have to talk about it and figure it out.
People assume this because you invoked capitalism for no gain whatsoever. As I've said elsewhere this discussion has happened before with no reference to fundamental economic systems.
It's not capitalism or markets that doesn't have a solution to this, it's a atomic property of this type of thing. There is no natural solution it's hacks and kludges all the way down.
Right, and somethings like price discrimination try to get at this but it's messy. The problem is the same mechanism we use to determine the value of the game is inherent to the scarcity. Something like a government buyout price could be interesting, a studio could opt to sell their languishing IPs straight to the state for some reasonable multiple of the cash earned to date but that's got it's own issues. Again, I'm really not opposed to tweaking the systems in play.
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His argument appears to be that Capitalism is why we have intellectual property laws, that the former creates conditions where the latter will always emerge.
But we can insert into IP laws anything we want. Invoking capitalism is purely going to muddy the waters. IP laws are not capitalism, they are an extra-market hack to incentivize the invention of goods that have little to no marginal production costs. @guesswho can propose any other hack they want, and in fact this conversation has happened on the motte without the invocation of capitalism at least once before. The fundamental problem that exists outside of any economic scheme is that some things have high upfront costs, some of which costs are in the form of risk, that needs to be born by someone while the fruits can be endlessly enjoyed by all. IP is actually a pretty elegant solution to balancing these incentives all things considered. I'm happy to listen to other suggestions but we're not going to be talking about capitalism.
I mean, 'the king hires you to be a bard and tells you when and where to play' was one such solution. Not a good one, but there are lots of solutions out there.
My point is that IP laws are a uniquely capitalist solution to the problem, because the whole point of IP laws is to let capitalist price-finding still work on post-scarcity goods.
There would be no benefit to IP laws and artificial scarcity if you weren't trying to achieve that type of price-finding through markets, which is the heart of capitalism.
Ok, but you have said we're probably better off keeping the rest of the capitalist(I do quite dislike this term as it implies a kind of rule by capital that I deeply disagree with so unless otherwise specified I'm substituting in 'Market based system with private property rights) system so unless you're proposing replacing that it does need to slot into a capitalist framework. You've proposed central planning with a distribution which has all the problems of the IP system, just as hare brained of schemes would instantly arise to maximize payouts and minimize costs, but lacks the things you get out of the box by going with a capital compatible system.
I agree IP couldn't work if there was nothing to be gained from ownership of the IP but that's just dumping a contextual system into an abyss that tells us practically nothing. What any system that encourages production which has high upfront costs and near zero marginal costs must have is a way to both compensate people who produce things that many people actually want and discourage the production of things that many people don't actually want. And it's a big bonus if it's not susceptible to waste based on signaling games, i.e. many people might say they want more educational programming but if in reality none of it is actually consumed that's a failure in planning.
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