Everyone wanting to operate their business in the way SaaS or subscription service is really annoying.
Photoshop gets jealous of saas numbers so they put out the creative cloud. Printer companies authenticate their ink cartridges. Coffee makers only accept their own branded cartridges.
Right to repair, right to modify, it all comes down to ownership.
"You will own nothing, and be happy." -WEF
Big capital has been fighting to strengthen private property and eroding personal property.
- ¿Drawing a schematic of a thing you own for repair?
- ¿Creating a spare part to repair a thing you own?
Those infringe on companies private property so you must have no rights over your personal property.
https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Personal_property#/Personal_vers...
What's happening is more like a lot of bugs trying to get into a box of food. The marketers and their lawyers have always used whatever tricks are at their disposal to sell one product and ship another, and if the latter is just a use license, so much the better. They don't need to be actively coordinated; their actions naturally support one another by damaging the box.
>The FTC also alleged that Harley-Davidson failed to fully disclose all of the terms of its warranty in a single document, requiring consumers to contact an authorized dealership for full details.
>By telling consumers their warranties will be voided if they choose third-party parts or repair services, the companies force consumers to use potentially more expensive options provided by the manufacturer. This violates the Warranty Act , which prohibits these clauses unless a manufacturer provides the required parts or services for free under the warranty or is granted an exception from the FTC.
The Warranty Act was enacted in 1975. This is not a new fight. It is an ongoing conflict that requires each generation to be engaged in defending the box and repairing it.
And studies show the more stuff you own, the happier you are, so this is a direct attack on happiness. Experiences don't matter, stuff does.
I think the conspiracy theory is imagining a bunch of wealthy elites sitting around in a dark room Illuminati style discussing how they can turn everyone into serfs renting everything from them.
The reality is that our capitalist economy is very short sighted and wants quarterly profits and returns. Subscriptions provide predictable and constant income, you can tweak the later both by raising prices or increasing subscribers.
well, according to Marxism that is a way to socialism :) And USSR was exactly it - a country of wage-slaves not owning anything and ruled by the elite.
This tethering should not be allowed. Anything that a manufacturer does to a product after it is sold should in principle be possible through another party.
It’s not as simple as it seems.
If you don't want anyone else to work on your products, then you need to only rent or lease them out.
If you claim to "sell" the product to the customer, then THE CUSTOMER OWNS IT, and should be able to do whatever T.F. they want, including decompiling, reverse-engineering, breaking locks or codes, etc.. The only thing they should not be able to do is manufacture and resell copies of it.
And, if you only lease/rent your product, you are responsible for disposal at the end.
Seems like a reasonable distinction and deal to make.
Acting like you are selling something when you are really only leasing it out, and withholding information and rights to the object is dishonest.
Just because it is profitable does not mean that it is right.
This needs to be codified into law.
Leasing ink on a per page basis is in now: https://www.hp.com/us-en/shop/cv/instantink
It’s amazing libraries have managed to stay true to their goal and not charge membership fees. Should authors be getting residuals on every read of their book in the same way every Netflix play of a movie pays an actor???
Those liquid cartridges are always drying up essentially causing you to throw away money you spent. For this type of cartridge getting the cartridge replaced frequently puts the burden on them and saves you money if you don't print much.
For toner it makes more sense to just buy the cartridge and hold on to it.
From what I understand from the article, Harley and Westinghouse aren't stopping you from repairing your own stuff, it's just that doing so voids their warranty. Presumably on the logic that you may have made changes that they can't be expected to support, or inexpert repairs could have caused damage.
And there's some logic to that, but it ignores the fact that if the item is still under warranty, those independent repairs should have been done under warranty too. (I guess emergency repairs where the owner can't afford to wait for the official repairs are the primary reason for such repairs?) And also that such repairs could have been done expertly or have been very limited, so revoking warranty for them may still be unjustified.
But I'd say there's a bit of grey area here. I don't think you can expect manufacturers to clean up other people's mess for free under warranty.
This legal action is about Harley saying your warranty is void if you have repairs done through a third party.
I mean the law says whatever it says and that’s the end of it, but it sounds like crap to me.
If I sell you a widget and I guarantee it’ll work for 5 years as long as you have me repair it instead of bob the janitor, I have a hard time seeing the problem. Frankly I think if you have bob the janitor repair your widget it’s now on bob to provide a warranty.
But what I think doesn’t matter, whatever the law requires is.
This goes beyond third-party repairs. The law says the company can't invalidate a warranty even if the user MODIFIED the product in question, unless the modification caused the issue for which the customer is seeking warranty service.
So the problem is this attempt to invalidate an entire warranty because of irrelevant actions the owner might have taken.
>I guarantee it’ll work for 5 years as long as you have me repair it instead of bob the janitor
Its called a lease aka I dont own a thing, I just pay rent. https://www.gmfinancial.com/en-us/business-financing/busines...
It also starts from the assumption that the "authorized" repairer can repair something better than an unauthorized repairer, which is silly.
Also see this comment for a practical take:
I think it was deemed abusive partly because independent dealers are deemed skilled professionals. But I also thing that it might not have been a restriction on the "right to repairs" if warranty had been void if you had tried to repair yourself (and perhaps they do have such a clause as well).
They don't want having to keep producing value to deserve the money, they want to just cash in, indefinitely, like nobles used to do.
I do not own or plan to ever own a Harley Davidson or Westinghouse product. I understand and 100% agree with the right to repair parts. The second part, however, I have a few concerns. So, if I buy a cheap replica part from eBay and put it into my Harley Davidson, it causes other problems with the engine and then I make a warranty claim, they have to honor it?
If your cheap replica part causes issues to the thing you're trying to warranty then yes. If you replace the headlights with crappy clones from ebay, and Chevy says your warranty is void on your transmission, no.
The onus is on warrantor to prove third party components caused damage.
That all being said, it's the top comment at this point
They were an absolute dream to work on. Everything was straightforward and consistent. The assembly was well thought out to enable in the field repairs. In my mind at the time John Deere was a brand that understood the needs of farmers.
I can't reconcile their current position on right to repair with my experience. Something clearly changed between the 1970s and today.
Every harley ive owned, every single one, has required at least a cursory knowledge of how to fix issues as they arise. youll need to learn to replace pegs, grips, and bars as the chrome and fitment of all these components on the sportster is just trash. youll need to learn how the oiler works on the dyna because well, it doesnt and youre going to be installing some aftermarket parts to get it to where it needs to be. youll learn the springs in the clutch plates are trash, plastic drive shoes that require frequent service, and youll need to be pretty good at replacing not one, but three separate types of oil (not just the sump tank.)
to "limit" my right to repair also implies Motor Company is in any capacity interested in honoring the warranty, which they are not. it implies a shop that doesnt have a 3 week lead time after COVID, it implies a competent shop that wont send you back with more problems than you came in with, and above all else it implies a shop that isnt going to nickle and dime you for repairs under warranty to a $30k bike that you had to pay to tow into the garage from some armpit like blythe or tuskaloosa.
I cant stress this enough: the aftermarket is and has been the only thing that kept my harley harem running from 2001 to 2015 before i switched to Yamaha. there are dozens of small mom and pop machine shops like low brow customs and loser machine shop that have parts for your harley that are not only available, but miles better than anything motor company can think to put out.
The three oils? Yes, that's a Harley. That's what they have: three oil pans, all separate. If you do not want that, do not buy a Harley.
If another system / design is better engineering doesn't come to the table. Harley-Davidson is upfront in: three oils. If you want a Harley, you get three oils (unleas you get a Vrod, or a Sportster, or one of the new Pan America or Sportsters with the new Revolution Max motor).
Their V-twin design is not only a shit engine - but it generates so much vibration that it literally shakes itself and everything on the bike to death, causing stuff to fatigue/wear/rattle loose, wiring to fray, you name it.
H-D dealerships are cash cows between that and insane accessory and clothing sales. They're basically Boomer cosplay stores.
Actually kind of sad, I know someone who makes $70k a year and rides a $50k Harley. They will finance anyone...sky is the limit. The marketing is such that you get sucked in with a $15k bike and they are setup to continually trade in and up...anytime. Racket on unsophisticated people.
It's almost laughable to say that about most of their bikes past the introduction of the Evolution in 1984. Their latest engine is as about as smooth as a V-Twin can get.
The years under AMF ownership were bad quality-wise.
And word didn't get around? Hmmmmmm......
The only overlap is getting hold of the manuals. Bike manufacturers have started to put them online only, like car manufacturers, and charge for access. That's a pain in the neck.
HD is a prime example of one of these brands. HD has been running brand loyalty fumes for decades.
They will also refuse to service the car or do bodywork on it (and they are the only place you can get bodywork for a Tesla done, I believe, as Tesla refuses to make bodyparts available), stop providing over the air updates (a violation of federal law, I believe), disable supercharger network access (and in the US, that means no fast charging whatsoever, as Tesla only sells a CCS 1 adapter in South Korea, and US cars lack the software to talk to a CCS charger), and turn off features that the owner had "purchased."
Richrepairs has found that they are quite arbitrary about when they declare a vehicle "totaled", and there's no recourse (except via civil court, I guess?)
To head the inevitable responses off at the pass, such as "well it's got that incredibly dangerous high voltage stuff, they have a duty to make sure it doesn't start a fire or kill someone":
* no other automaker requires VIN numbers for authorization purposes. You can walk into any car dealership and ask for a part number, and get it.
* no other automaker makes it their business to declare their vehicles road-worthy or not. No car manufacturer bothers to maintain such records except maybe for recall notification purposes, or tracking historical vehicles (such as non-road-legal, factory-built race cars for which there will eventually be heritage)
* no other automaker makes parts sales contingent on whether the vehicle is road-worthy or not. Or even if such a vehicle exists. GM, Ford, Dodge, and numerous other automakers will in fact sell you "crate" engines for whatever purpose you want. Again, no questions asked.
...all that, for vehicles that use a carcinogenic, poisonous, highly flammable fuel called "gasoline" which readily generates highly flammable, heavier-than-air vapors.
Or, for that matter, for their electric vehicles. A number of which use twice the voltage Teslas do.
However, instead, Tesla just won't sell you parts. Either "hard" ("sorry, we show that VIN number as no longer road worthy") or soft ("that part is back ordered")
edit: I'm an idiot. I read the comment as being about Harley Davidson.
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2022/04/apples-self-service-r...
Possibly this was just to head off this kind of enforcement aimed their way.
If one human can repair it, so can other humans. They can argue “safety” all day but there is nothing magical about certification.
[0] https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/328610-new-dmca-exemptio...
I'm not aware of a case of Tesla ignoring Magnuson Moss to deny a repair.
Although the limiting of supercharging and other DCFC on salvage vehicles has been a problem. I'd like to see something done about that, but I'm not sure if there's a law that applies.
People don't always understand me when I make this argument. We aren't just talking about fixing your own Tesla in your driveway. We're talking about your certified master mechanic that has more qualifications than an average tesla tech fixing it at their independent shop.
A bigger issue is that some shops don't like to deal with the risks of lifting a car with a battery. Poor lift procedures can cost them a lot of money, and some avoid the liability. Most have reported success with Discount Tire, Costco, and other normal shops, though.
For some context, the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act [1] mentioned above was made a law in 1975. This action by the FTC is basically calling HD and WH out on their noncompliance with this law, and more generally announcing their intention to enforce it more boadly. It's unfortunate that the FTC has allowed this lawbreaking behavior run rampant for decades, but I'm glad that they've gotten off their laurels and are finally moving on it now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnuson%E2%80%93Moss_Warranty...
Anyone getting butt-hurt over that should go back to Reddit.
I ride commuter most days and used to do on weekends. I like the 2nd hand market having so many low mileage bikes.
While I am not about to make disparaging remarks on Harleys reliability, I won't buy one because I like my bikes to perform.
Also, amongst my friends the "Boomer cosplay stores" comment rings true. Nothing inherently wrong with that I guess but not my crowd. I mean, people buy italian supercars to pose down slow streets with too. Your money, do what you want.
I agree with you, though. There should be a way to be certified independently to buy all parts (HV or otherwise).
As phones have matured as a product people have stopped buying them at the same pace as in early years. And so to counteract this Apple has gone heavily into services, accessories etc.
So just as Apple has increased OS support periods for phones they are much happier now for people to fix their phone and stay in the ecosystem than switch to Android.
If you have a decent car from that era like that, hang on tight to it and take care of it, and watch the value just soar over the years, because they will never make them like that again.
Not all humans are created equal.
Repairing a mechanical watch for example requires fine motor skills, decent eyesight, impeccable patience etc.
And modern day electronics are fast approaching that level of complexity.
No. What I said was that certifying someone does not give them magical abilities.
Two people who have equal motor skills, eyesight, and patience (etc) have equal ability to repair. The one without official training just has to learn through experience.
The authors were not saying it’s the society that the World Economic Forum should be working to create, just that it seems remotely possible, certainly not a plan for a conspiracy. Rather, it’s more similar to a fiction like The Brave New World... On second thought, regardless of whether you treat it as a fiction or as an actual conspiracy, you get the same message, so I’d say the thought experiment is successful in that aspect.
I think it was a neutral thought experiment, and you're free to make your own interpretation, it's neither an utopia nor a dystopia.
> It is as much a thought experiment as it is an invitation to advance the state of "Everything as a Service" rent-seeking among those in power
I don't disagree here.
"We asked experts from our Global Future Councils for their take on the world in 2030" is not much of a preface, if this was as purposefully exaggerated as you're saying.
In this new vision, the billionaires own everything and others owning nothing - at which point they become serfs. It is a regression to feudalism.
If anything, it's the logical continuation of the trends Marx saw.
What do they do about vendors that don't cooperate, like John Deere, or Sony?
(Serious question, not sarc. It definitely is not the case in the US, and the country that already has such laws might be a good indicator of a good place to move).
Yes, it is in the interest of many owners of corporations that own IP to push for XaaS model, a rent everything model. And some of those may attend the WEF.
But the WEF is not a conspiratorial group. And that often quoted and misunderstood fragment is not some declaration of their values.
People like to hate the WEF, or Soros, or the illuminati, or whatever because it gives the enemy a face and it directs the anger.
The reality is that most of the things damaging humanity are not masterminded by someone or some group. They happen organically due to the various self-interests of individuals.
Edit: Just to make it extra clear.
The difference is not in the interestes of the members of a group. You will find wide agreement that wealthy and powerfull people are interested in getting even wealthier and even more powerfull. Or at the very least retain all of their priviledges.
The difference is that conspiracy theories presupppose that the group has a structure, that the group can coordinate. And by extension, that the group has a leader, which if only you could KO, all of the worlds problems would be solved.
The structure is not there. And even if you eliminate all the individuals designated as enemies by a conspiracy theory, the greed and the pride is still there and they will be replaced by others.
I used to work in IT at a public school district 15 years ago where they had hundreds of Epson printers with fixed printheads. This saved costs in the cartridges but the inks(which were designed to produce excellent photographic results) had some substance that caused them to clog up these very microscopic printheads essentially rendering the printheads and thus the printer destroyed. This happened a lot on printers where people would only print once in a blue moon.
Seems like you can have two options: poor quality but thin water based inks. I'd argue Laser had taken that market away from inkjet for good. The other option is hight quality photographic ink that is much thicker and gels up easier. Not to mention the printheads are more delicate due to their finer pitch.
Even within different lines from the same manufacturers I remember that varied because of the design of the cartridge.
And similarly commercial printers would be more aggressive about automatically ensuring the cartridge ran every once in a while than home ones. All things they could (and probably did) tweak when moving to this model
TBH, I'd see that.
Everytime I dig into someone complaining about right to repair I find someone who wants to bypass emissions controls.
We can regulate emissions and farmers can be penalized for violating them, so that can’t be on John Deere.
To say that they can use the same scan tools is a false solution because John Deere could simply choose to stop selling it to them.
And while in your experience repair issues are “non existent to most customers”, we cannot let that be a reason that we don’t pursue right to repair. It’s like saying “most of the slaves are treated well” (which I admit is an exaggerated comparison, but it shares enough similarities that I’m sticking with it)
The letter of the current emissions laws and court case law is it is on John Deere. So start by talking to your federal representative about this.
Are you willing to pay for someone to go around and do random exhaust sampling of tractors? Most farmers aren't doing anything, but there is no way to know which farmer is the 1% that is without testing. If it is still "factory" then it meets emissions (VW style scandals aside, but then catch one you get them all), how are you going to enforce it if anyone can make violating changes?
> To say that they can use the same scan tools is a false solution because John Deere could simply choose to stop selling it to them.
Probably not. The protocol is the ISO11786, and we will keep using it because there are other customers of engines who demand it. The engine in our tractor is also sold for use in boats (boats are not large enough a market to pay the development cost of a modern engine, but the profit margin makes them worth selling to), it is also used in generators, and a number of other applications, and those customers demand standards so they can fix things when it is in their unit.
Also, one of our big selling points is everyone knows you can get parts for old John deere tractors (but not our competitors), and so the trade in value is higher.
Though technically you are correct, we can stop selling scan tools, the reality is there is too much value to do that.
> while in your experience repair issues are “non existent to most customers”, we cannot let that be a reason that we don’t pursue right to repair.
Sure, but be very careful about the what the law says. Most right to repair laws are not helpful to someone who uses a tractor as intended, but are useful to those abusing it in ways you may not want them to. violating emissions better be clearly on the farmer. What about the person who buys a used tractor - we use the same engine on a 200 and 300 horsepower tractor (I'm not sure without looking the exact range, but that is close enough for discussion), it wouldn't be hard to modify the smaller tractor to have more power, but that will impact how long the tractor lasts and thus the value to the next owner. There is no way to know if someone made that change and then undid it.
There's also no easy distinction made between private and personal property, and any attempt to define one is nonsensical. There are endless examples where something is both personal and private property, or rapidly switched between the two.
Yet another aspect of Marxist theory that fails to hold up to even the lightest scrutiny.
I have a wheelbarrow in my yard that I'm not using. Why can't anyone else use it? There's no natural reason why they couldn't. It's just there, they can take it and wheel dirt around in it. I might no even know it's happening, but my property rights say they're not allowed to.
I think the main feature of property is to disallow others from using it in a way that restricts your own use. For IP, others selling copies would restrict your ability to sell copies as they undercut you.
I wonder how you feel about medical information being free to copy? That's not property either, is it? Are you happy with no moral rights for subjects of photographs and no rights to privacy of medical information? Should patients "own" their medical records or should hospitals be free to use them however they like?
The residuals for whatever service will stream it are going through the roof. Funded. Get ready for swedish marooned family part 2!!!!
If nothing else, other industries wrestling with right-to-repair should probably assume that they can model themselves after the automotive industry.
There are other industries that have long traditions of repairability, such as home appliances, gas powered garden equipment, and so forth. I've repaired most of the appliances in my house at some point. I've found replacement parts to be readily available and not exorbitant.
Same goes for John Deere.
Motorcycles are probably different for the time being. Not expecting people to really want self driving motorcycles.
Like I said, I don't really know where to draw the line. I hate that my multi-colored LED lights have an app that talks to a server. I don't run that app, but my iPhone tells me I need up update the lights and to do so I need to get a 3rd party app. Is that another thing where regulation should require being able to update without an account or is the fact that they had to spend time making the update mean I need some kind of relationship with them?
That sounds like an argument against self driving cars.
I just bought a new Kitchenaid mixer (albeit a commercial one) and it included instructions on how to tear it down for both maintenance and cleaning.
From kuerig’s perspective it’s a better decision to build a machine that cannot be modified, as they may be at blame and will have to spend millions on lawyer fees proving McDonald’s modified and misused their product.
- The injury due to the coffee burn was due entirely to the elevated temperature.
- The machine would not have served at the scalding temperature had McDonald's not made the modification.
- The modification was specifically made to raise the temperature to a level that turned out to be unsafe.
The question of whether a modification was made would almost certainly come out in court because a McDonald's employee would be unlikely to perjure themselves over it.
Therefore, all the liability would be on McDonald's.
Though I do see your point about legal costs being incurred even if the case of Kuering being completely innocent. It seems that having a culture instilled with a nebulous concept of "liability" encourages people to limit other's ability to take their own risks.
(Edit: formatting)
If there's a gray line it'll come down to some third party judging it but I don't think this is any different from say, verifying an insurance claim.
It's fine to want something better. I, personally, gave up on inkjet printers and switched to laser a long time ago. I have only ever been an occasional printer but I always want a printer available for when I need it. I have no interest in photo printing either, so a laser is perfect for my needs. Perhaps you have different needs. I can imagine it being very frustrating if you want to print the occasional photo and are always finding the ink cartridge empty or dried up. Personally, if I wanted to occasionally print a photo I would probably get it done professionally rather than waste money on yet another inkjet printer.
There are personal printers that use "dye sublimation" cartridges. These don't dry up from what I gather and also allow amazing results at home on demand. Not as cheap as in store services but not that bad either. You are limited to one print size though which is unfortunate.
Finally, food-grade grease appeared on Amazon, so I got that.
It’s very different for commercial users, because the machines have to be lubed regularly, and bakers can’t wait around.
(The famous third party service of McD’s ice cream machines comes to mind.)
There doesn’t need to be “walk don’t run” signs everywhere, and liability waivers for every activity.
They are all farmers, do the farmers' thing. And the latter is more efficient. It makes sense (and IMO is better) for a tractor company to cater for the latter.
It's not conspiratorial in the mustache twirling sense, but it is 100% an unambiguously desired outcome of how our tax laws and accounting principles are currently structured.
A system is perfectly tuned to generate the outcomes it does. If you don't like those outcomes, you have to change the system.
Those days are long gone. Fewer small family farms, fewer friendly and trusting people, fewer simple things for mechanically minded handy men to fix.
There's a lot of good things progress brings us, though it is often interesting to ponder on what we have lost.
I honestly blame film/TV and other modern media for implanting anxieties in people via a combination of sensationalist news reports on gruesome crimes and the horror genre which seem to form a feedback loop of mistrust. Before that people had to go out of their way to hear of such grizzly tales in books or newspapers (if they could even read) so most lived in ignorant bliss, unaware of the potential violence lurking in every corner of humanity. Maybe I'm wrong but I'd just like to know when ans why it was we lost out innocence as a society.
Nowadays, people tend to have more worth stealing - including your identity if you happen to have documents in an easily accessible area of your home. Back then, though, there wouldn't have been much worth taking from a small family farm- no TV, cell phones, electronics other than a radio and light fixtures for the most part (this would have been in the 1930's or 40's, I forget which).
One last stay thought: hospitality and community in general were much more central to people's way of life in rural farming communities then- farmers would help each other out with planting and harvesting, share equipment, every person in the community went to the same or one of two churches, etc. People had to rely on each other just to survive.
MBAs took over American companies. They're the ones who cook up these exploitative ideas so that no money is ever left on the table.
Tractors on the cloud.
Castles in the sky.
The main difference between the wheelbarrow and IP lies in the copies. If someone else uses my wheelbarrow I can't use it while they're using it, or they may damage it. If someone copies an mp3 of a song I performed, I still have my mp3.
We had a working economic model based on physical property and we've been crippling the wonderful ability to infinitely create zero-cost copies of digital artifacts in order to fit our existing model. It's not horrendous that we've done this, and I'd optimistically view it as a step on the road to something yet unrealized.
> medical data
That deals with privacy, which is a different can of worms.
It is already a topic discussed in the agricultural space.
Just imagine a future where we will have cures for some incurable diseases, but as a consequence of IP laws, the pharma company now controls your reproductive rights because you are making copies of their IP.
This is a common argument, but one that is ungrounded in reality. Ancient tribes were small and certainly had fewer (or no) written rules, but there is plenty of evidence that they had personal property. Grave goods are just one of the most obvious. Neolithic huts with fences built around them to keep the livestock safe are another. We have stories dating all the way back into prehistory of shepherds counting their sheep. Etc, etc.
Just because you own something does not mean you automatically have a right to receive the revenue you want.
Being undercut by free when selling copies of x is absolutely natural for a medium where producing any additional copy of item x is free and can be done by anyone.
Want to be paid for the original new content, then sell that. Plenty of new content is already being funded that way. And before IP existed, all creative content was funded that way.
What IP allows you is to instead of demanding a bounded ammount of compensation for a bounded ammount of creative output (demand payment per creative work), you instead can demand an unlimited ammount of compensation.
IP is monopoly rights and undermines physical property.
"Intellectual property", as a term, also serves to further layman confusion on the topic. I can't count on all my appendages the number of times I've spoken to an average person (whether in person or via the internet) where they've said something about "copyrighting" a business name or other trademark. Let's call "intellectual property" what it really is - copyrights, trademarks, and patents. Each of those has a completely different framework of regulation and philosophy, and it doesn't really serve us to lump them all together into one term for most productive discourse on the topic.
It exists to deal with the dynamics of scarce goods. If person a is using your wheelbarrow, then person b cannot use it as well. You can't raise cows on a piece of land, but also plant a crop of wheat there. This definition goes back thousands of years and is respected across cultures.
There is another practice that was respected across cultures for thousands of years: the free sharing and open remixing of songs, stories and ideas.
IP is a weaselly project to carry the advantages of property rights to non-scarce goods, and to things which were previously fiercely regarded as public domain. It creates a set of rights which did not previously exist and which created new benefits for people who were already elites.
"For IP, others selling copies would restrict your ability to sell copies as they undercut you." This does not follow from the argument you are making. Selling something is not a use of it. Carting things around in a wheelbarrow or playing a compact disk - these are examples of use.
Perhaps you bring some cultural bias to this conversation. Having grown up in a setting with IP, and having a career in a field where some people gain great advantage from IP, you have come to believe that it is reasonable to regard ideas as property.
But IP is an aberration, even in our time. It is not law in all places, it is not enforced well in the places where it is, and in those places people who are morally conscious and otherwise law-abiding routinely violate it.
IP is impractical to enforce equally, is inconsistent with the principle of live-and-let-live, it raises the barrier-of-entry to a range of industries, it grants extra privileges to existing elites, it is easily gamed by bad-faith actors, it is disrespected by the general population, it has at best a hand-wavey economic justification that is backed by no real evidence. IP is complicated when good laws are simple, and IP muddies the water for a concept that is a genuine foundation of our civilisation - property. IP fails all tests for what is reasonable law.
If the government were to say that black were white, this would not make it so. So it is with property.
Intellectual property doesn’t exist, it’s all just privileges handed out at the whims of the the state the same way only Dentists can practice dentistry.
Secrets aren’t the idea. Far more than 1 million people use 6 digit pins therefore most if not all of them are shared by many people and that’s completely ok. The value is in the secret not the exclusivity. RSA private keys are compromised if someone knows the number and knows it’s part of someone else’s key, two peoples private key’s can happen to share a prime number without issue.
A sandwich on the other hand can’t happen to be eaten by 20 people without the others noticing.
Finally, what protects the company producing cokes is the trade marks on their packaging not the formula. I can know Coke’s formula or something close enough to be indistinguishable and nothing changes for them because I can’t undercut them and sell an identical product.
The existence or absence of IP laws does not affect your capability to have secret information in any way.
Patents, one of the types of IP, was actually designed to encourage holders of secrets to release them. But the ability to hold secrets is completely unaffected.
Also, just because you hold a secret does not mean anyone owes you anything. You may sell a secret and you always could regardless of IP.
What IP allows you to do is, after you've made a secret public, demand compensation every time other people share it among themselves.
So just to be clear, are you arguing for an massive expansion of intellectual property rights to all secrets?
No, I'm saying all property rights are constructed and enforced by the state and they're all figments of our collective imagination. There's no fundamental ontological difference and the lines we draw are arbitrary. I'd support rolling back some of the IP protections we currently have in place, and I'm also in support of higher taxes in some cases, and other restrictions on physical property rights, but there's not a magical difference between IP and physical property that means we should regard those things differently.
Maybe we even treated some of them the same but certainly not today.
I would argue that, at least from some points of view, in the past, marriage was treated similarly to physical property. Thankfully we no longer do so.
Scarcity and the lack thereof is fundamental difference between the physical and the digital.
A secret can be scarce but the more copies are made the less scarce it is.
Encoded information (either written text -language is an encoding- or digital information) can be copied losslessly infinitely for a vanishing marginal cost.
Sure, enshrining property rights as law is a human social construction. The goal is to limit the use of force, otherwise everyone has to guard thair own property, gun in hand. But property itself arises naturally.
> Animals have been guarding the kills for millions of years before humans even evolved.
And in the state of nature, if a stronger animal comes by and defeats you, it gets that kill and you get nothing. In the world of property rights, the state protects your right to your stuff. The fact that you can own more stuff than you can defend with personal violence is not natural.
Also, the state can take away your things with taxes or eminent domain, and it can say you can't own certain things, like nuclear weapons, heroin, or other people. But the latter two used to be allowed, in the United States, at least.
Property rights are a function of law, not a function of nature.
The way you use harm here implies that you believe that the world owes J.R.R. Tolkien something for having written LotR. In the case of commerce, the buyer owes the seller the agreed price. But noone owes anyone for simply writing something.
If a creator creates a creation, nobody, by default, owes the creator anything for having created it. If the creator wants to make the creation the object of a contract, they can do so. In that case, the parties of the contract owe the creator whatever was agreed in the contract. This is how Patreon works. And how financing art worked before IP was invented.
IP is not a contract!
IP is a legal monopoly right on the duplication of an infinitely and freely duplicable item. And the only way to enforce IP is to infringe on everyone's physical rights.
As to the law ‘respecting’ personal property, we have this thing called taxes that says the state just gets to take some of your stuff based on the same principles that a larger bear gets to take stuff from a smaller one. As to how much stuff you can protect, squirrels aren’t limited to what they can defend they can just hide it.
And scarcity is not a function of the digital realm.