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China's pledge to stop respecting American IP-- and in particular copyright for hollywood movies-- is possibly the only silver lining of this tarrif business. The american entertainment industry is a juggernaut, but that comes at the cost of making sanitized slop consumable by the maximum possible audience. On the liberal end of the table, no one is willing to make movies that really push the boundaries of sex and culture-norm violation (gay people holding hands is the tamest shit ever), and on the conservative end of the table we similarly don't have anyone willing to push the boundaries of violence and jingoism. Plus, completely giving up on IP law is the first step in actually re-industrializing the united states. The whole point of IP law is to create monopolies, and monopolies are intrinsically inefficient-- so the western world's respect for IP law is a massive albatross around our neck. In a world without IP law the only thing we lose is the class of parasitic middlemen that can make a living on the bullshit legal fiction that ideas are an asset.
I disagree here. Without protecting of patents and other IP, companies are not going to invest in creating new technologies.
The philosophical justification for patents is that they allow the genius of a new idea to capture the benefits of their contribution to society, thereby encouraging them to be geniuses. Except-- that almost never actually happens! The people actually responsible for the ideas that lead to vaccines, or to AI advancements, or to new machines, typically only capture a tiny fraction of the value they generate anyway. The rest goes to stockholders and to upper management. And while that parasitical class tries to present themselves as necessary to the genius' ultimate success, you should view that with the same skepticism as if an FDA regulator claimed to be responsible for the creation of some new cure or treatment. Maybe they're contributing something-- but the primary reason they exist is because of a distortionary, monopolistic government intervention. So the default assumption should be that they're worthless rentseekers-- extracting value from consumes and producers through their artificial control of resources that aren't naturally excludable.
Companies might stop investing-- but that's fine, because companies are full of unproductive middlemen. But if people want something done, then they'll invest. Have more faith in the free market! Can you seriously not think of a single financial instrument that might be used to fund research by purely self-interested parties? I can easily imagine something like a "transferrable kickstarter" system, where I put seed money into a research-production concern that's building something I'm interested in, and in return they guarantee me the right to buy a certain quantity of the product early, which gives me access to a potential for arbitrage. Sure, another person might start their own concern, intending to steal the advancement and produce it themselves... but then I get the thing I want even faster, and they have to risk their own money on a product that might not work out, against an unknown number of competitors that want to do the same thing.
And in practice, we already see so many companies funding open research, and posting the results publicly. If it benefits a company to invent something new, they will-- and if their competitors are interested in the same thing, then they're likely to contribute, rather than copy-and-fork, because that gives them the ability to determine the course of the initial development.
posting research is a far cry from developing a product.
My argument applies globally. Why should the researcher get to create a rent-seeking monopoly to extract wealth from the work of process engineers? Why would process engineers get to rent-seek from the work of factory laborers? If people actually want a thing, and are willing to pay for that thing, there will still be plenty of market forces conspiring to give them that thing. I just want to take all the rent-seeking out of the equation. Maybe it served a purpose two hundred years ago when we had far worse transportation and communication infrastructure, but now it's a crutch. Our financial services technology has evolved to the point where IP law is wholly unnecessary.
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