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Selling Something? Go to Jail! That's copyright infringement... :-/

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SeraphimLabs:
The entire concept of IP was to prevent the following scenario:

A backyard inventor develops a prototype of an engine that can rival the power to weight ratio of jet propulsion, but retains the predictable behavior and performance characteristics of a piston engine. This development is done on a rather tight budget, and the resulting device takes a long time to reach the market due to the inventor's limited funding. With some persistence, it eventually happens and makes a fortune in doing so- or proves to be a market failure and is shelved with all of the other useless inventions.

Fiat Group, one of the big brass that owns several major automotive brands, takes a liking to this invention and figures out how to make one just like it. They then use their phenomenal investment capabilities to develop the concept and deliver a viable product to market in a manner of years, before the backyard inventor would have even gotten started with the first production type.

The result? It is impossible for the little guy to actually get anywhere, because the big names will always steal his idea and beat him to market. Copyrights and Patents were designed to prevent that, giving the little guy some authority over his creation.

Over time they've strayed from that purpose, and now are a tool used by big ticket interests to bully the law abiding population and ensure that nobody can ever compete with them.

Which is where the notion that copyrights and patents should not be available at all to Fortune 500 companies would result in a phenomenal improvement in the current economical and legal landscape. It would then be possible again for the little guy to compete, while big interests usually can leverage their financial resources to stay ahead of the R&D curve well enough to compete with other large scale companies and make sure the little guys stay on their toes.

There would also be a dramatic increase in the conductivity of the marketplace to new ideas, as ideas that have long been crushed under overly broad IP and squatting would become available again so that innovation could improve.

tomos:
Which is where the notion that copyrights and patents should not be available at all to Fortune 500 companies [..]
-SeraphimLabs (October 26, 2012, 11:58 AM)
--- End quote ---

I cant really see you accepting the idea of discrimination - I mean if it's allowed one way, it'll be allowed the other. Mind you, saying that, there might be a workaround...

SeraphimLabs:
I cant really see you accepting the idea of discrimination - I mean if it's allowed one way, it'll be allowed the other. Mind you, saying that, there might be a workaround...
-tomos (October 26, 2012, 03:28 PM)
--- End quote ---

The reason for it is that Fortune 500 companies are the top 500 companies in the world in terms of profitability- Company #500 on the 2012 list was showing 4.something billion dollars in profit, while the #1 had over 110 billion dollars.

Copyrights and patents were designed to protect individuals and small businesses from their larger competitors. Do the top 500 companies in the world really need that protection too, when they are almost unrivaled in capability as it is?

I think it would be better implemented as that fortune 500s could still own patents and copyrights, thus they would also be able to create new ones or buy them from people. But they would not be able to enforce them while on that year's Fortune 500 list- thus if becoming a Fortune 500 caused them to lose enough profits that the following year they aren't anymore, their IP would be enforceable again.

But it would do a great deal to eliminate such things as companies buying patents just to hide them from the public, as smaller innovators would then be free to expand on those concepts and if it annoyed the big companies enough they could simply attempt to out-compete their smaller rivals, or buy them out.

The end result would be a major boost to innovation, as smaller companies would be free to invent and develop while larger companies would have a greater incentive to continue improving their technology so as to maintain their edge over the imitations.

Companies like Microsoft who are notorious for poor quality product would very quickly lose out without a major R&D turnaround, because fortune 500 and backyard programmer alike would be able to develop drastically improved alternatives that are plug in compatible.

And it would really put a lid on the scale of this whole IP legal mess we have, because the worst offenders would suddenly no longer have the authority to pursue such things.

The obvious workaround is to simply divide up the big companies into smaller ones, because then they wouldn't be as likely to be Fortune 500. But as a side effect, their amount of pooled wealth and political sway would be greatly reduced on top of the encouraged competition.

I've yet to actually come up with any ill effects of this, if you can think of one please name it.

Renegade:
The idea of stripping fortune 500 companies of IP rights make sense.

Laws are *supposed* to protect *people*, which right now they don't.

Corporations are not people. They are legal fictions. They are ideas. Allowing them to own IP is the same as allowing an idea to own an idea.

Rights are for people. There's a reason they're often called "human rights".

Tinman57:
  The reason the courts stated that corporations are people are because even a fortune 500 company isn't a single entity, it's made up of tens to hundreds of people that are investors and expect the company that they invested in to make as much money as possible.  Trying to bring down the fortune 500's would involve thousands of individual investors, which is a fight that the gov't don't want.  Not to mention that these fortune 500's pay in (read that as pay off) to the gov't.  It would be like shooting your boss, no boss, no paycheck.....
  The only way we are ever going to get out of this mess is with lobbying reform, and our paid and bought politicians aren't going to cut their own throats.....

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