Best. Of. Cory Doctorow’s essays (with sh*t i had no idea about)
Funny how imaginary trust systems somehow “killed” imaginary property. Maybe someone could expedite the meaning of this essay into my brain (I seem to have misplaced my Word Salad-to-English dictionary).
Maybe someone could expedite the meaning of this essay into my brain (I seem to have misplaced my Word Salad-to-English dictionary).
The “meaning” if it can even be called that is just a really unhinged rant hating on the fact that cars have computers in them despite seemingly having zero understanding of automobile design, consumer market research, or economics.
There’s a lot of BS in there, but here’s my takeaway:
IP law protects large organizations and limits competition
For example, if I want to make an arcade cabinet, I need to get permission from all of the rights holders of each game, even if those games aren’t available for sale today. If copyright expired after a reasonable time (say, 5-10 years), I could make competitive products.
Another example is that if I buy a movie, I cannot legally buy tools to break the encryption to make a backup. So if my disk breaks, I’m SOL and need to buy another. So I do not truly own the thing I bought.
Or for the example of cars, if I buy a car today that has hardware for heating my seats, I cannot use those seat warmers unless I pay to unlock them. I cannot do that because the company owns the IP for the system to enable it and I have to pay to access that closed system. If they didn’t have such strong protections, I could buy cracked software to break whatever stupid encryption they have.
And so on. I think the comparison with feudalism is silly (this is different, though if you squint it’s related), but I see that as largely SEO and rage-baiting.
The real argument is useful, and here’s my takeaway:
- we should fight for the right to repair, but realize it’s a distraction from the real fight we should be having, rich is:
- we should fight to fix IP laws to encourage more competition in the marketplace; if there’s enough competition, companies will need to make better products instead of just suing competition into the ground
Yeah, but fixing IP law is a much more broad problem than computers and cars, and is honestly approached much more cleanly through the lens of basically anything else it applies to in the consumer market. Because frankly, cars are not only one of the least user-serviceable items people own simply due to complexity and price, but also the truly bad practices are honestly pretty narrow in scope, with most people not driving cars that have the aforementioned user-facing issues.
It also doesn’t really help that the article leads with an utterly uninformed and reductive summary of the chip shortage and goes on to complain that an integrated GPS system… has access to it’s own location.
And don’t get me wrong, IP law is a massive issue, and you’ll be hard pressed to find me defending it as it exists, but this article is just a terrible argument against it. The strongest point are the links to other people making better arguments.
Stopped reading when he misexplained and oversimplified the microchip shortage.
I stopped reading when you made up the word “oversimplificated”.
English is a foreign language for me. Which languages do you speak?
Mainly I’m objecting to the “I stopped reading at…” thing. I generally find Doctorow’s work and activism to be good quality.
Well, I have limited time and happen to know what the microchip crisis was actually about. If he makes this the introduction of his article, he really should try to be more factual and less simplyfing. It sends a signal what to expect from the rest of the article. If have since then skimmed over the article and found some complaints about big tech that I share but in absolutly no way anything that could make things better nor a concise explanation.
And he gets stuff wrong all the time.:
- His depiction of capitlism as something where you create value and get rewarded vs feudalism where you own stuff and get rewarded is fundamentally screwed. How does he think John Rockefeller made his fortune? By refining oil? Well, I’m pretty sure he never in his live refined even one barrel of crude oil. How did Howard Hughes made his fortune? Making something valuable is for some (some also skip this through inheritance) the first step of becoming a super rich. The next step is always letting others (or even your money) work for you, give them less than they deserve and take more than you need.
- Companies trying to maximise profits and being not consumer friendly is no thing that was born in the information age. Already the light bulb had planned obsolence, food safety regulations haven’t always existed so people literally died because some companies liked producing cheaper more than having healthy costumers, tons of highly addictive drugs were sold to people with various claims, most of the time without medical evidence. Consumer protection is a thing that emerged from people fighting for it, and in the end, becoming law. Why this extra step with questionable effects when we could just say: “corporations have to ensure that they’re products are made in a way so they last as long as possible plus must provide ways to repair them really cheap and if anyone fails to comply their company gets taken away by the state”?
It seems to me that he is so much brainwashed by capitalist propaganda that he refuses to call capitalism a broken system despite him decribing it as a broken system but with a different name.
My favorite part of the internet (aside from porn) is that there’s exactly zero obstacles in the way of people posting their unhinged schizo rants for everyone to read.
