True, though that could also happen with the right court case. A bunch of right to repair related stuff, ‘right of fair use’, etc. has been won that way.
Intellectual property law has always had an element of ‘society gives you these protections with the idea and understanding that it makes EVERYONE wealthier in the long run’. There is no NATURAL RIGHT (as in, something that will happen unless interfered with) to exclusive anything related to knowledge.
If anything, it requires extraordinary work and legal protections for it to be even a potential thing, and that is becoming more and more the case.
To get that protection from Society (without it just being a naked theft from everyone anyway), there should be some exchange or actual improvement for the rest of society.
Saying that at a minimum if you have exclusive rights to sell or distribute something, you must be selling or distributing it at a rate that allows normal people to access it (there is the tough part - how do you define that!) or you lose exclusivity and anyone can distribute copies for free - seems perfectly fair.
It also encourages archiving and retention of our history, which would be a good sell for overall society I imagine.
Some issues of course with this position (as I was thinking it through).
- this basically means no one has any IP right to stop information being distributed at all. So if someone say writes a book, then is later embarrassed by it, they couldn’t stop people from publishing it. They currently can.
- this means highly valuable IP (source code to your secret search engine backend?) is very difficult to control. It would also probably apply to things like manufacturing howtos, blueprints, etc.
- Even if you say ‘distributed’ means publicly viewed, this probably impacts distributed/licensed software in various ways, and some of these others. If someone is able to open it in a hex editor that is certainly going to count as ‘viewable’. If they can do that without signing an NDA (which would probably be impacted by this too?), or going through a gate and doing it at your secure facility, that probably counts as ‘public’ too.
- so then there is no way to stop someone else from distributing your now deprecated software? Potentially for a fee?
Intellectual property law has always had an element of ‘society gives you these protections with the idea and understanding that it makes EVERYONE wealthier in the long run’. There is no NATURAL RIGHT (as in, something that will happen unless interfered with) to exclusive anything related to knowledge.
If anything, it requires extraordinary work and legal protections for it to be even a potential thing, and that is becoming more and more the case.
To get that protection from Society (without it just being a naked theft from everyone anyway), there should be some exchange or actual improvement for the rest of society.
Saying that at a minimum if you have exclusive rights to sell or distribute something, you must be selling or distributing it at a rate that allows normal people to access it (there is the tough part - how do you define that!) or you lose exclusivity and anyone can distribute copies for free - seems perfectly fair.
It also encourages archiving and retention of our history, which would be a good sell for overall society I imagine.