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Intellectual Property is Bad for Humanity

I used to chafe at Stallman’s suggestion that if a school child brings a program they coded to school that they are morally obligated to give a copy of that program to everyone in the school, that somehow that is the right thing to do.

Stallman was right. He just presented it the wrong way.

Last night I watched the Cyberwar movie on HBO (not to be confused with the amazing series from Ben Makuch on Vice, and winner of the World Press Freedom Award for going to prison before giving up his sources). While watching how China has meticulously stolen most of their greatest inventions — and openly proclaimed their strategy to their forces and the world — that those who still believe ideas are “property” will be destroyed in the present and future of every endeavor.

Ownership of things is what keeps the current form of the human species alive. Attempts to take away ownership have all failed miserably. Humans crave ownership. Watch the upper-echelons of society in the art world, or the NFT craze, or TF2 hats, and you cannot deny it isn’t even about the money. It’s about having something, possessing it, hopefully in a way that others cannot.

But none of that has to do with the fact that China’s premier fighting jets are almost exact copies of America’s, because they stole the plans and everyone knows it. China has no shits to give. “That which we cannot create, we will obtain”, is the essence of that call to modern warfare from the Chinese leadership. That scene from Mr. Robot comes to mind, “We look forward to stealing your intellectual property for many years to come”, says WhiteRose directly to her new business partners in Chinese so they don’t understand. That’s China. Americans are so fucking full of themselves and how-can-they-even-feed-themselves stupid — like Trump, and Sheldon Adelson, and Clapper — that China and North Korea just hack and steal our IP with wild abandon while smiling and shaking our hands.

How do you fight against an enemy who openly steals all your best ideas, whether it be a nation state, or that idiot down the hall taking credit for your work? Here’s how: you beat them to “market” and make sure everyone knows you did.

This is a new realization for me.

There’s a joke in Saturday Night Live where one non-contributing zero says, “Well, it’s like Albert Einstein said, it’s about 1% inspiration and 99% getting your name out there.” (I showed that video once on Twitch to my community and most of them didn’t laugh.) That statement is just so fucking true, despite the comedic value. You do have to market your idea or it will never get adopted, or worse, someone who is smart enough to realize how good the idea is will act on it and get the public record before you that they created it (reminds me of the invention of the transistor, or electricity, or the PC).

We can learn a lot from the Mother of all Demos. Engelbart did almost no actual engineering on any of the stuff he demoed. He wasn’t even an engineer. Sound familiar? Jobs was the same. Woz invented the PC we have today, but it was Jobs who got the credit. Jobs stole (and admits it) the idea from Palo Alto engineers at Xerox who (few people know) stole the idea from Engelbart. But we can trace that IP to Engelbart even though — yes even in America — there was rampant IP theft all over the place.

No one cares who owns something. We just want to enjoy the fruits of these ideas and the unsung engineers who made it happen, like Dennis Ritchie, the creator C language. Trillions of lines of C run our entire fucking world, every device, including Apple, PC, phones, mother-fucking traffic lights, but Dennis’ death the same week as Jobs went virtually unnoticed. Dennis didn’t market. Dennis produced. He changed the world in ways so substantial we can hardly measure it today. Jobs? Meh.

All this demonstrates that ideas cannot be owned. In fact, after extensive research to protect my BattleForge game idea (which EA actually straight-up stole from a post I made in a newsgroup) I realized that the law is that you cannot protect a game idea at all. That’s why we have everyone who wants making Chess boards, and Connect-Four, and Tik-Tak-fucking-Toe. We got that one right. You cannot patent a game idea, period. You can copyright the specific copy of the rules and your logo, but you cannot protect your game in any other way. Your only option is to market the shit out of it and make sure everyone knows about it — and that you made it (if you care).

Software is no different than games, other than the specific code you write to realize that idea. You can try and patent everything like IBM or Amazon (who actually patented one-click purchases, which is fucking idiotic). Or you can create something based on your idea and beat everyone to market.

But here’s the thing. China doesn’t give a shit about our patents and copyrights. If you make it public (or even if you don’t) they own it as soon as they have it. You just cannot fight that shit. All we are doing by making it illegal and waste time, money, and energy to sue the fuck out of each other is expend all our resources on superfluous shit while China, Russia, and others shake their head watching the next super fighter jet roll off the assembly line. The only thing we are doing is shooting ourselves in the foot by playing the greedy “intellectual property” litigation game. Even if you are a bloated, racist, Vegas billionaire you have to appreciate this objective reality. You are killing yourself by fighting over who owns what while people who don’t give a shit are just acting.

This goes for books too.

By the way, how much do you charge for your “property”? Do you force the entire world to pay American prices? What if you gave your book away for free and asked those who can pay to pay what they find is fair, for the portion of the book and knowledge that they found useful. People in countries with tougher economies could pay their “widow’s mite” for your knowledge that takes them out of poverty (and then they send you a huge email of gratitude for it) while other affluent SV people can sponsor you for $60 a month.

Wherever you are philosophically, this means that the very nature of “intellectual property” is the problem. You just cannot “own” ideas and trying to do so hurts you more than it helps. Plus it pulls down your entire society and ultimately humanity. The more ideas get out there, the more people can riff off them and make them better.

Then there is the problem of people trying to horde or “own” their ideas so that others they disagree with cannot have them. Nuclear power comes to mind. Lately, we seen a ton of idiots try to attack Russia by disabling their “open source” software and crippling thousands, most of whom aren’t even in Russia. That’s because these fucking morons don’t understand that once an idea has escaped into the public, no amount of legal protections will keep it from being used.

I’ve had to face this myself. I’m making Bonzai, which I believe can be a hugely transformative approach to command line user interactions. I thought to myself, “Russians will make rats nests and malware using my tool. It’s perfect for it, I mean, really fucking perfect.” Do I somehow try to keep hackers from creating such tools? Or do I lament, “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds” like Oppenheimer (okay, my stuff is nearly as powerful, but you get the idea).

No, I should dedicate my time to helping those I agree understand and adopt the idea as fast as possible. To help the good guys win the battle of time. That is exactly what Oppenheimer did. The World War II win was about time to market. The allies beat the Axis with the Enigma, Eniac, and A-bomb. The point is, it’s not about ownership, it’s about action. Those who act first, win.

By removing the silly laws and costly squabbles about IP ownership, we light a fire under everyone’s ass with a good idea to do something with that idea before their competition.

Time to go, my ass is on fire.

Don’t get mad, get busy.

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