Do you think IP rights could work with some kind of exception for independent people who coincidentally happen to invent similar things?
If I'm a big corporation, I see your small company's great idea in the market, and I copy it and undersell you to drive you out of business and steal your market share, you ought to be able to sue me.
But if I'm some dude on the opposite coast who comes up with a similar idea, and I can show documentation of my own independent invention process with notes and prototypes or whatever evidence some court might require to prove that I didn't copy or steal someone else's idea, it would be a shame if I got shut down with a lawsuit. Maybe some middle ground, like what they do with preset copyright royalties for music, ought to exist in that case.
No, I think in every single case IP is unjustifiable. Stephan Kinsella lays out the case here https://mises.org/library/case-against-ip-concise-guide
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This is one of those situations where it's academically interesting to ponder libertarian philosophy, but in the real world, if I could buy one copy of your book, make a million copies of it, and sell it to everybody, so that you didn't make a cent, nobody would be an author. There would be big companies, and even bot programs, out there pretty much copying everything that ever gets published.
Every single thing that ever got invented would be invented by Google or Costco. Because Joe Normalguy would have zero incentive to ever start a business or come up with any new products or ways of doing things. He might as well just get a job at Google or Costco. Because the second Joe tries to make something new, if it's the least bit commercially successful, Google will steal it, make it faster/cheaper/better, and Joe won't make a cent.
It's one thing to say that some IP owner shouldn't have the right to stop you from reconfiguring your own slinky, which you own, for personal use, in a way that would infringe a patent. But surely he should have the right to stop Google from seeing how well his product is selling, copying it, and driving him out of business. Otherwise, nobody bothers inventing reconfigured slinkies because coming up with new ways of doing stuff is just a waste of time and money.
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