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How the computer killed capitalism.

Best. Of. Cory Doctorow’s essays (with sh*t i had no idea about)

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29 comments

  • 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.

29 comments