> This business model should have collapsed in the face of this technology. The market would have been forced to adjust to some new model

This very obviously did occur, though perhaps not as quickly as it might have otherwise. The market of CD and DVD sales has absolutely collapsed, and streaming services have taken over, regardless of that fact that this was initially resisted by the industry. But this new paradigm, which offers a much better product to consumers, is only possible because of IP rights. Piracy is no longer the existential threat to this industry that it once was, because legally licensed content has been able to offer a superior user experience (in most cases). But if I was allowed to set up a Netflix clone, host anything I wanted on it, and undercut their prices, then capital allocation to content creation would evaporate immediately. The thing you’re trying to promote access to simply doesn’t exist without these protections, and those protections don’t prevent anybody from crowdsourcing something if they want to.

> In practice, trade secrets don't usually stand up to sophisticated reverse-engineering efforts, and patents frequently and consistently fail to disclose implementation details that are important to how something works.

The ubiquity of out-of-patent technology in the market place seems to undermine the idea that the public doesn’t benefit from capital allocated to IP R&D. You don’t have to think about it for very long to realize that without these protections, allocating capital to innovate production and synthesis processes that can be maintained a secret becomes the most appealing investment for capital that would otherwise be going to patentable R&D.

A stance against IP protections in general is extremely fringe and extremely short sighted. If a system has problems, advocating for abolishing the entire thing isn’t very sensible, especially when it’s a system that has already provided so much benefit to society.

You might hypothesize that those benefits would have been realized even without that system. But that hypothesis doesn’t really stand up to much scrutiny, especially when we know for a fact that the value this system has created is directly quantifiable.

I don't think there's strong evidence that piracy even was an existential threat in practice, but regardless the new business models that have emerged are in fact far worse value propositions for consumers that want to be able to keep a copy of the thing they watch or listen to, access said things ever again without a continued subscription, or be able to find media that doesn't require being spied on by some company to use. It's also a worse value proposition for artists, who receive much worse pay for works on streaming services exactly because their reach is so massive, and they can spread their risk out across lots of artists and markets by making it much harder to make a living off their services for said artists. Technology will always change how business is done, but right now, the law is playing a role that makes that shift more toward companies having strong controls over and surveillance of their customers that can't even legally be circumvented in the name of protection of IP. A business model like BandCamp could easily have worked without the DMCA. A business model like Netflix couldn't, but I don't really consider that a good thing

> the new business models that have emerged are in fact far worse value propositions for consumers that want to be able to keep a copy of the thing they watch or listen to

I think the market has demonstrated that this isn’t what most consumers actually want. But in any case, the anti-piracy provisions of the DMCA are so weak, that anybody who wants to can still pirate with almost absolute impunity. I personally think the anti-circumvention provisions violate the 1st amendment. But it’s hard to say this is a significant regulatory failure, because you can avoid the issue entirely by calling any circumvention tools you produce something other than circumvention tools.

The issues with existing IP laws are readily apparent to me, but this doesn’t extend to an argument against IP as a concept in general. Lots of regulatory systems have shortcomings, but it’s a significant leap to conclude that they can’t be improved.

There are example of things that can’t be effectively regulated, without causing significant harm to society. A lot of people would say that illicit drug consumption falls into this category. But in this case the harm caused by the regulation, and it’s shortcomings in actually providing much benefit is very straightforward. There’s really no comparing a situation like that, and the issues created by existing IP laws. In my anecdotal experience, most of the people who take a broad anti-IP stance also tend to hold anti-private property positions in general.

What consumers currently use isn't evidence of what they want, it's evidence of what they want out of what's available to them. The widespread "piracy" epidemic was also pretty good evidence of revealed preference, and I doubt it would have changed so much if not for the draconian crackdowns on people without the tech savvy to get around enforcement.

I think at the point where you agree that IP isn't fulfilling its purpose, the burden is on the concept of IP to demonstrate that it is a valuable legal concept, and all extant implementations simply fail to correctly realize it. Since we're playing the game of making wild extrapolative comparisons to arguments we haven't made, your line of argumentation reminds me of kids who balk at using the Soviet Union as an example for pure command economies being a bad idea.

I think property rights are, if not a necessary part of a functional society, at least something that we don't have a reasonable alternative for. In other places in this thread, I've contrasted situations in which property rights make sense with the ridiculous results of trying to apply the same principles to abstract ideas. The claim that it's not sane or coherent to consider ideas property is in no way equivalent to an objection to property rights in general

> I think at the point where you agree that IP isn't fulfilling its purpose

I think it very obviously is fulfilling its purpose generally speaking. I think this is evident in that fact that consumers have access to an extraordinary variety of technology, and content. The fact is that the prices for access to this are continually falling, the quality of products and services is continually improving, and these factors are continuously improving quality of life across all sectors of society.

The success of this system, and the benefits it provides to everybody is perfectly evident everywhere around us. You can find instances of this system failing, and identify some patterns in those failures, along with particular components of the regulatory framework that are likely responsible for more bad outcomes than good ones. But the system itself has proved its value many times over.

Edit: I also think the extent to which hoarding content collections has fallen out of favor with consumers is rather compelling evidence that the on-demand model is more popular. But that’s a little besides the point.

Ah, the ol' "This is part of my idea of the status quo, so everything that's happened since that could roughly pertain to its stated purpose serves as evidence that this practice uniquely produced all the outcomes I like"

Classic

If you wanted to you could draw some correlations between IP laws and innovation throughout history. You could observe that the start of the renaissance coincided with what was (likely) the worlds first patent system. You might also notice that no jurisdiction that has lacked IP protections has ever achieved signifiant levels of technological innovation. It could be reasonable to draw some inferences from that, but it's not exactly conclusive due to all of the other influencing factors that history failed to control for.

A more reasonable approach would be to look at how resources are allocated today. R&D investments are made in areas where IP protections can be maintained. For technological innovations, this is largely through patents, or by not actually disclosing your IP to the public (by offering your innovation as a service rather than a product to your customers). There are examples of business that have attempted to operate without IP protections, but they've frequently been massive failures that have reverted back to asserting IP protections in order to survive (Mongo, Elastic, Docker...).

There's examples of innovation resourced by non-IP related means, but this is obviously not a very successful model, because the level of innovation it produces is tiny compared to the innovation resourced by IP protection. I can't think of any company that has managed to replicate the RHEL model recently. The give something away for free to drive sales of something else model is quite limited in the ways it can be applied, and often times it's back by selling something with IP rights attached to it. Do you think Intel would put so much effort into contributing to Linux if it didn't have other IP that it wanted to sell you to run your Linux on?

Yes, when you look at phenomena in retrospect, you can decide that all kinds of things are the sole unique cause of other things that happened afterwards

In general, it's very easy, starting with a model and a bunch of phenomena, to explain why all the phenomena fit the model, regardless of what the model is. This is why we care about things like randomized controlled trials or recording when a hypothesis fails to predict a result in science

It's also ridiculous to claim that monetary investment in a context that does have a strong concept of IP demonstrates that it creates more innovation: My whole argument is that the value of IP is to hoard it in order to make money, and companies invest in things that produce it because it will make them money. Given the financial incentives involved, it is vacuously true that this will happen under the current laws, and this has no bearing on whether this is more efficient or produces or encourages innovation

In software, a considerable amount of innovation does happen in FOSS, and gets re-used in industry to build products. This just doesn't get captured as said technologies (libraries, drivers, etc) turning a profit themselves because again, the laws as they currently exist do strongly incentivize, with money, doing things the way the most profitable corporations in this space do it, tautologically

Intel contributing to FOSS is a great example of why a company would care about FOSS even in the absence of IP: Intel sells, first and foremost, a physical good that it has invested considerably in infrastructure to produce, which involves a supply chain, equipment, and material expertise that is expensive and difficult to replicate, much less at the scale that lowers their costs. Without software, that physical product would be of little value to most people, but without patents on the chips, Intel would still be able to manufacture and sell chips and turn a profit