societies, and our regulatory frameworks, need to move beyond the idea that "data is produced and resides within a particular geo". Not only is it not, it is also holding us back from leaping forward / bootstrapping into the beyond-meatspace.
Even if you could go back to the wild west days of the 90s, most people these days would just complain about how people could go ahead and say whatever they wanted without being cancelled.
We started with the dream you're referring to, and it couldn't stand up to the crappiness of reality.
Copyrights and parents provide assurances that spending large sums of money (millions/billions) to create new technology won’t be in vain. There are issues with both (too long copyright, patent trolls, obvious patents) but they are better than not having any protections.
Why would anyone make a movie or game if it’s going to be almost exclusively pirated? Would anyone invest in new camera technologies, computer graphics techniques/algorithms, motion capture tools, etc?
Why would anyone spend millions/billions creating new vaccines and medicines if anyone could copy them and they weren’t going to get paid for their research. Good will only goes so far.
You’d only do it if the budget (risk) was peanuts, and unfortunately innovation needs money. People need a roof over their head and food on the table. Which would leave only rich governments with the means to fund such advancements, and their ideology often won’t be aligned to such endeavours.
That is th biggest lie of intellectual property.
Just having a patent or copyright on something does NOT guarantee income. The assurance is a perpetuated myth.
Either are only good if you can find someone willing to pay for licences.
In many cases, reality has proven that economic actors find it preferable to spend resources to avoid having to pay for licences. See all of the duplicate work in IT an patent proliferation in pharma.
Many many patents only ever had an impact on the world after they expired.
Many more patents are created by companies that are producing the patented products themselves. They're not looking for anyone to pay for licenses, they're looking for protection against people copying what they're doing.
Many trade secrets were lost forever and didn’t impact the world.
Patents are a tool to disincentivise trade secrets and that is good, but they do a lot more than that and much of it is harmful.
People keep saying that, but no one comes up with any data to back up the assertion.
> Why would anyone make a movie or game if it’s going to be almost exclusively pirated?
Because they like it? See: 0AD, Nexuiz, Battle of Wesnoth.
> Would anyone invest in new camera technologies, computer graphics techniques/algorithms, motion capture tools, etc?
I read someone posing this question and proposing the answer that yes, patrons are going to crowdfund what they want to see.
> Why would anyone spend millions/billions creating new vaccines and medicines if anyone could copy them and they weren’t going to get paid for their research. Good will only goes so far.
Wait a minute:
> they weren’t going to get paid for their research.
Lack of protection is not connected to lack of remuneration. US government spends millions/billions to get data from the outer space, despite that data not being protected.
> innovation needs money
Makes me wonder how the innovation of money came about before there was money to spur innovation.
A drop in the ocean compared to all the other games out there. These people could afford to make the games because they have other income sources. So sure, if you can do it, great. They are the exception not the norm.
> I read someone posing this question and proposing the answer that yes, patrons are going to crowdfund what they want to see.
Most people wouldn’t contribute and just rely on others to donate. Limiting the amount of development and discovery.
> Lack of protection is not connected to lack of remuneration. US government spends millions/billions to get data from the outer space, despite that data not being protected.
Yes as I said it will then end up being the rich governments that get to pick and choose what’s important. Do you see the US government funding research into safer abortion techniques? Improved methods of detecting defects in babies (so you can consider aborting them?)
Just look at the lack of innovation in Soviet Russia vs America.
> Makes me wonder how the innovation of money came about before there was money to spur innovation.
Innovation needs money or barter or other form of remuneration.
You're moving the goalposts. You asked why, and I answered.
If you show why they can never possibly become the norm, you might have a starting point for more discussion.
> Most people wouldn’t contribute and just rely on others to donate.
And that's cool. Most people don't use any given product. It's those who care that are important here.
> rich governments that get to pick and choose what’s important
I fail to see how that's different from today. The rich are the ones who decide what kind of movies we see, Hollywood being a prime example. They decide what kind of intellectual property laws exist to favor which research or medicines, and they are responsible for ridiculous insulin prices (just look at USA versus anywhere else).
If anything, forcing people to self-organize by crowdfunding or following their hearts provides a chance to shift the balance.
> Innovation needs money or barter or other form of remuneration.
Have you never done anything because you got a kick out of it?
There is no sphere that is outside the government's control. None. Create one, and the government will come round to enforce its will on it.
Doing that without eroding national sovereignty is essentially impossible. We would need something like the European Union for all of humanity.
And even the somewhat limited powers delegated to the EU were enough to cause serious backslash as we have seen during Brexit.
A rich nerd needs more than criminal protection, BTW.
Just a few basics:
Without the machinery of society running well, wealth becomes quite burdensome. The nerd needs said wealth recognized, means to transact, enforce contracts, currency to trade with, and all that depends on courts and governments of some kind. And there is more. I just sort of stopped.
There will be value in the "ether", but it will also intersect real space and there is the relevance.
Talking about this is sort of like those free energy machine discussions where everyone excited about the machine potential forgets about the initial energy input and how entropy will bleed it away however slowly.
Wealthy nerds do not just appear and create in a vacuum. And no judgement on the idealized nerd being discussed. Could be a wealthy anyone!
A poor nerd needs the same protection as well as the means to do all the basic human stuff needed to exist and practice nerdery. (I laughed at that being a defined word)
In terms of being a nerd and creating ethereal value, it looks to me like assuming wealth just makes it considerably easier to ignore where this stuff meets up with reality, a lot like some free energy machine presentations end up compelling enough to sideline the initial energy input...
Rich nerds don't pop into existence out of a vacuum, but now that we exist, we can move to the country that suits each of us best and do the same work with roughly similar incomes.
Yes, we still need the common infrastructure, but for the most part, I need a fast internet connection and a lack of bullets coming my way. This drastically reduces the hold any one country has over me, which is what allowed me to wave goodbye to my country of birth and move to a country where I like the tax/spend pattern more (Canada).
Theoretically, one could site all earning, investing, and banking in some tax haven and just use a credit card to transact. We'll still need countries, but they will be more like regular infrastructure providers (civilization as a service?).
Let's talk about farmers and fields for a moment:
Early on in human history, the first farmers began their work with fertile ground.
Mistakes were made, understanding gained, improvements were also made. And this is just humans being humans.
Over time, it was observed the earth can become parched when farmed too many times without putting some of the yields back into the soil. There are no free lunches. Every so often, it is necessary to invest in the earth so that it remains fertile and yields bountiful.
Farmers, having once learned this, continued to do it, and everyone is living in relative harmony.
Along comes big Ag. Good yields are not good enough. They want the maximum, and they ignore history and proceed to max the ground out, and of course it becomes parched.
Rather than invest in the maintenance of fertile ground, which requires some crops be grown to be turned back into earth, they treat the ground chemically and continue.
And now there is a top soil problem where there was once fertile ground. And so they basically mooch top soil from somewhere else, and on it goes.
Turns out those high yields are quite expensive for everyone else!
Now, let's look at what you say you need:
For example, what gives that fast Internet connection value?
A wealthy society in which to derive that income! This is fertile ground. See where I am going with this?
What happens when that wealthy society is not maintained? In other words, what happens when the ground becomes parched?
Bullets, among many other things like it being harder to get that income due to lower demand as greater numbers of people struggle due to growing economic problems and those are generally due to labor not paying what it costs for people to actually exist and show up for work and perform that labor, and also generally due to debt accumulation in the form of "parched" societies in serious need of reinvestment.
It's great to maximize it for you, thinking of only your considerations as if the rest of the world just comes gratis. It doesn't you know.
Really, this is all no different from the farmer who does not see the need to reinvest in their ground. What they do is get all they can and when that ground becomes parched, they call it someone else's problem and move to new, fertile ground where they wash, rinse, repeat, until they have a lot of wealth accumulated and have left behind a lot of parched ground for others to restore to being fertile, and doing that isn't cheap!!
That farmer could have invested in their ground, still could have accumulated considerable wealth, but would not be costing everyone around them very large sums of money while doing it.
Nobody exists in a vacuum. Everything costs something. And if you are not paying it, someone else is forced to, and or where it's not paid, other costs and risks, such as bullets, tend to follow soon after.
That's it. Ideally some food for thought regarding "needs" being far greater than the idealized picture you put here.