The Church of Intellectual Property Law

Has prevented or ended more joy than war, sickness, and accident combined.

I’m not being hyperbolic. I’m confident an unbiased analysis would conclude that. This post is inspired by the somewhat laughable situation of Google being fined Decillions in Russian court. In that case it’s a combination of exponential fines, and a company that essentially called a bluff. But for me the interesting part is the related concepts applied.

Extortion, the nature of money, corporate execution, are all related topics I’d like to touch on here, but the thought of really writing it all out is daunting, especially since I’ve written about it all before. All the stuff in my previous post still applies. But I know I have at least a couple actual readers now, so I can at least put in some effort to elaborate a bit on how I see things.

So, firstly, how I arrived at that figure. I don’t just count deaths. And I don’t just count harm inflicted. I also include opportunity cost. It’s extremely sticky, because you could very much argue what they cost us was a massive delay on reaching post scarcity. And you could even say the cultural cost has been staggering. How much art and music and software didn’t happen because of greed and spineless collaboration. But the real killer is medical tech.

The drug companies are just software companies when you get down to it. Licensing their chemical code monopolies. Arbitrarily setting prices as high as possible while innovating as little as possible. Industrialized malicious compliance from the perspective of human demand. A monkey’s paw version of what we were really asking for from the medical industrial complex. The worst possible expression that remotely passes for the wish being granted. The incentives are all wrong. Cures from their perspective are the worst thing they could produce.

Consider, the entire fiscal motive for mRNA medicine was and is the looming mass expiry of drug patents. Considering what covid did to the world, I think you can begin to see where I’m coming from.

I write best in response to people, so if someone has a question or something, please put it in the comments. To see more about my position here just search Innomen, and “Church of intellectual property law” or “church of IPL” and you’ll probably find my comments.

What do I suggest? Abolish IPL. Handling should be equal to recipes and cooking. Track credit sure, but even that’s a little sticky, just ask the Muslim world about all those science and math principals with proper European names that post date their actual invention centuries earlier. TBH, I am tired of names on this stuff. Science shoudln’t be about glory, but that’s another discussion.

This is not a call to action, we don’t have time. The singularity is coming to moot all arguments, but I figured given the recent event I’d hammer this out a bit. Again, this is not my definitive work on the subject, I’ve probably written 30,000 words elsewhere in the form of comments and older posts in other places. But its hard to aggregate and synthesize stuff like that. Gotta wait for the one AI to rule them all to bring it all together. :)

Sidenote: The fine on google illustrates that progressive cost is always just a threat. Fines just mean legal for rich people. And even when a fine is paid look who its paid to. It never goes back to the people. The Banks ultimately just pay themselves since they own both the companies and the governments that send them an invoice. This is all just logical fallout from letting work be a thing, because work is the first accountability diffuser.

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