It is anecdotal but I think of the invention of forceps - incredibly useful for midwifery but kept secret for fear of losing money.
I think that Diffie et al did actually invent something in mathematics. They were able to publish in an environment where their claim to invention would be respected and they could reasonably expect to profit from it (in career terms).
This is the nice, fluffy level where everyone publishes for
the common good. I am all for that. I just don't think that works for a world where the majority of value is exepcted to arise from not physical labour but the application of intelligence (to physical labour)
As a simple example - I build a concrete "squirting" robot that like a dot matrix puts dabs of concrete down on the ground, and with some darn clever software it can build a house or a office block.
I think I should have to choice whether to release that code as free, or if I make all building companies pay me royalties. How we enforce that I do not know, but I do know that I would rather live in a world that has the problem of working out how to share out the value created by robots that build everything, than potentially strangle it in its crib.
Then you'd rather live in a world where inventors and their corresponding corporations can't actually sell anything, lest advantageous innards be studied and duplicated. Instead, they have to hire armies of lawyers to issue non-disclosure agreements to all their customers, who are greatly constrained in their use of new inventions because of the need for secrecy. It's all the same to the lawyers.
There are other ways to encourage innovation besides creating legal weaponry which are suppressive to individuals and small companies, and provide wide motes against competition to giant corporations. The Nobel Prize, Pulitzer, Fields Medal etc. The X-Prize (a private space craft!) Open source software has resulted in companies achieving billion dollar plus market capitalizations for the companies which created them (orders of magnitude more in businesses based on such sw), successful kickstarters which raise millions for a great idea... In the technology world that we live in, what has created more wealth and technological velocity, patents or open source software? The right to restrict the use of an idea is a terrible idea. It's a global lock on thought.
Except it isn't economically feasible to have a lawyer army and to try to keep millions of NDAs under wrap.
But you come at it from the perspective that you just clonk down our culture and psyche around information into a world without IP and everything goes to shit.
In reality, businesses evolve and adapt. Rather than consider r&d a capital investment in future revenue, your r&d budget is a public service - something you would want either cultural pressure to coerce out of businesses (I'm also a libertarian, and IP is just raw governmental power) but you could also argue from the socialist perspective the idea of using violent coercion of the state to transfer wealth into r&d.
Either way, you are not researching to create profit. And I would argue you don't need to anymore. The things people want are things people will pay money to see developed. Not pay for in the end product, but pay the researchers up front. Instead of sitting back and hoping a cure for Parkinsons gets funded by a medical megacorp looking to profit off the IP, you throw money at Parkinsons thinktanks, and can appraise them on an individual basis for their merits, and put money where your mouth is for the things you care about.
And then the rest can be voluntary. For the most part today many of our modern revolutions are voluntary - everything from standardized Internet protocols to tcp/ip were all developed not as for profit ideas but as standards to elevate humanity, and we reaped huge benefits from them.
Because all that money spent today on R&D, and today on the patent lawsuits and lawyers, and today on policing every corner of society to ban thoughts and numbers, could be spent funding the research you want.
Because it is a value proposition in whatever regime you have, but I am of the opinion that those who value research into certain fields would throw money at it regardless of profit motive because they want the end product, not the potential capital gain. I'd even argue that is a more effective way to develop innovation, because if your goal is the invention and not the profit afterwards, you have much greater clarity of vision to meet your goals.
you throw money at Parkinsons thinktanks, and can appraise them on an individual basis for their merits, and put money where your mouth is for the things you care about.
Historically, the "throw money at it" approach to solving problems has not been particularly successful. We're not just talking about a single disease, we're talking about thousands upon thousands of illnesses. Markets are the most efficient mechanism we have yet discovered for the productive allocation of resources. Unless you can show how you'd bring that power to bear on practical medical research in the absence of IP, you're stuck telling a story about how this time, some bureaucracy will get the job done. I'm shocked any libertarian really believes that.
I think that Diffie et al did actually invent something in mathematics. They were able to publish in an environment where their claim to invention would be respected and they could reasonably expect to profit from it (in career terms).
This is the nice, fluffy level where everyone publishes for the common good. I am all for that. I just don't think that works for a world where the majority of value is exepcted to arise from not physical labour but the application of intelligence (to physical labour)
As a simple example - I build a concrete "squirting" robot that like a dot matrix puts dabs of concrete down on the ground, and with some darn clever software it can build a house or a office block.
I think I should have to choice whether to release that code as free, or if I make all building companies pay me royalties. How we enforce that I do not know, but I do know that I would rather live in a world that has the problem of working out how to share out the value created by robots that build everything, than potentially strangle it in its crib.