And yet it's true. Literally cannot be refuted. It's a fact that all information is a number.

Bruh. I'm with you on IP being useless, but insisting on something being a "fact" is meaningless.

It's a fact that everything can be represented in binary. You can identify every knowable concept as either "cat" or "not cat". That's a fact.

Now... who cares? What does that being a fact mean? It means nothing. It's not useful. It doesn't prove a point any more than what you're saying does. All information is a number, that's a fact. Okay. Now... so WHAT?

The charge here is that some public information deserves protection. You disagree with that but, again, who cares? Prove why your opinion on that is relevant to any other human being, or engage with your irrelevance all by yourself. On the "protect public info" side, we can say that things like your social security number needs to be necessarily public, but we need to be able to stop people from using it however they want. There are indexing reasons for that. There are medical reasons for that. There are (yes, far too many) financial reasons for that.

And if you don't like that example, let's try one more directly applicable with a creative example: trade marks are public info. But if we let every person do whatever they wanted with a trade mark, they lose the real, tangible value that they provide (iconography is foundational to how human brains efficiently interpret information).

So pick you poison, but then engage with the actual poison; don't just wink behind smug tautologies. Tell us how, in your view, we can have a framework that provides the values that we get from IP, when we don't protect IP, as a concept. Because, buddy, I've been longing for, and working towards, that kind of framework since I figured out how pathetically inept IP is at actually doing what it does.

> Now... who cares?

I care. So should you, and so should everyone here on Hacker News.

> What does that being a fact mean? It means nothing.

It means everything. It means what they really want is to more or less control what arguments you can pass to memcpy. The only way they can possibly do that is to destroy computing as you and I know it.

Think about it, about what they're really doing. All information is bits and copying bits is a fundamental computer operation. In order to restrict that, computers need to be made so that they will run all the programs, except the ones that invalidate intellectual property. Most likely they'll be made so they can run only the programs they approve. Government signed binaries, programming licenses.

Surely everyone here agrees that such a future is dystopian.

Neat.

Now, on to that actual engagement with the problem that I asked you to do...?

How do you guarantee the same value we get out of IP, without IP? OR, how do you propose we get along without the value that we get out of IP? What does that world look like, in a practical sense.

You can whinge about your pet libertarianism all you want but it doesn't actually get you any closer to being relevant. No matter how much you think anybody "should" care.

> How do you guarantee the same value we get out of IP, without IP?

I guarantee you nothing. There are alternative business models that don't require artificial scarcity. Returns are not guaranteed.

> OR, how do you propose we get along without the value that we get out of IP?

I propose we don't.

> You can whinge about your pet libertarianism all you want but it doesn't actually get you any closer to being relevant.

It's just information, numbers. Therefore you can just input it all into stable diffusion models and LLMs and generate an infinite number of similar enough numbers at negligible costs. And there's nothing anyone can do about it short of tyranny the likes of which this world has never seen. And even then it's doubtful it's gonna work.

It's just information, numbers. Therefore you can copy and transmit it with no limits and with complete impunity. The only success they had at stopping it was making it easier not to infringe copyright but their greed destroyed even that. Doesn't matter how many billions they invest into DRM, copyright infringement still happens at scale literally every day. Copyright infringement is natural, it's how people think. It happens every single time someone right clicks and saves a picture off a website, every single time someone makes a little meme. And there's virtually nothing they can do about it short of destroying the internet as we know it.

How's that for relevance?

The only ones who are "whinging" about anything here are these dinosaurs. They're the ones who are irrelevant. They are so absolutely and thoroughly irrelevant they need government intervention, literal government granted monopolies, in order to not be completely and utterly wiped out by technology. They're sacrificing computing, everything we love, so that they can continue their rent seeking with centuries-long monopolies on bits. All I'm saying is we should sacrifice them instead. And let the chips fall where they may.

Right. Because the only answer this ideology proposes is to "burn it all down and..."

Which you might note is not an "answer" so much as it is succumbing to the chaos that you don't feel is important enough to control.

I do appreciate you making that explicit though! It's often hard to get people to admit to such naked dismissal of functional societal mechanisms that actual people get practical, tangible value from. Definitely contextualizes the framing more vividly.

> Because the only answer this ideology proposes is to "burn it all down and..."

Nothing wrong with that. Intellectual property proponents will "burn down" the entire technology field to get their way. Every day it's some new DRM bullshit. They couldn't care less about hacking and values like computing freedom. Then you have governments who want to do things like stop citizens from using strong cryptography.

The fact people currently get value from it doesn't justify its continued existence.

> succumbing to the chaos that you don't feel is important enough to control.

Controlling it requires destroying everything I care about. I'd sacrifice the entire copyright industry to keep it.

> I do appreciate you making that explicit though!

It's what I strived to do from the beginning. I want to see things clearly, as they are. If the conclusion is the current status quo is a lie and should be abolished, so be it.

Must be nice to be so privileged! I hope every damaging thing you are apathetic about happening to other people happens to you so that you are able to test your principles in the most comprehensive way.

No need to hope, I generally try to put my money where my mouth is. I give away my software under copyleft licenses. My website has no advertising, no tracking, nothing. I have no intention of ever suing anyone for license violations either. I have a sponsors thing which I think is a perfectly ethical way to make money since it doesn't depend on artificial scarcitiy. It's currently sitting at zero dollars per month and I'm not complaining about it. I don't even advertise it because I think advertising is unethical. I try not to post my projects unless people ask me about them. Whatever wealth I have was not earned by means of intellectual property.

If you find instances where I'm contradicting my beliefs, I give you free license to call me out on it in public. I will either try to justify myself or try to change immediately if I can't.

I didn't say anything about hypocrisy; I don't care how you comport yourself or whatever personal restraints or actions you use to justify how you eschew empathy for ideological purity. You think you're unique? Or particularly virtuous? All of my software and licenses (and contributions) are CC0. How is that relevant? It's not.

What I hope for you is that when you are reliant on something, it is stripped from you without regard for how you need it, and hopefully using a particular kind of logic that you find repugnant. That would be an appropriate reversal of the ideology you are preaching. I hope that you lose something you NEED and that the people that could help you simply won't. Not out of inability but out of ideology. I hope that it happens to you not because it would be distressing to you, but because I am confident that such experiences can make one understand how ideological purity (in any specific aspect, logic included) is not a particularly useful measure of the validity or utility of an ideology as it pertains to applicable function. And if it doesn't, then your argument is only enriched by having experienced it. It's a win-win, if you're interested in the type of rigidly structured nonsense you're expressing.

Then you'll be happy to know it's already happened.

I relied on my country being a democracy but it's not. I also relied on socialists not being in power but they are. I also relied on my country growing economically but things are looking pretty bad, and they seem to get worse everyday. There's a never ending list of these things. There are people out there who could have prevented it and they did nothing due to self-interest rather than ideology. Those who couldn't have stopped it but protested anyway are currently rotting away and dying in prison, having received worse punishments than murderers and rapists.

If you check my submissions you'll find threads about it. I'm sure you'll get a kick out of reading my comments. Enjoy.

Thank you, that is good to hear. I hope it continues to happen to you in more dire circumstances such that your education continues to enrich. I hope that you are so marginalized by ideology that you can no longer be, just like you advocate for those reliant on the values of IP. I hope that your education continues until you can be an example of the perfect version of what it means to have those engaging in ideological purity decide that you are an 'unfortunate consequence' of rearranging society in their image.

I'll take your silence as a realization of said pinnacle, and any future responses as indicative of your need for further education. And, in those cases, please understand that I am continually hoping for your success in that. Bonne soirée!