No One Is in Charge at the US Copyright Office

Software engineers and tech workers will make their living off producing IP then say shit like this.

> You criticize society and yet you participate in it. How curious.

without siding with the perspective being voiced, i feel compelled to point out your comment sounds like you believe there is a real alternative to criticize yet participate. even if you attempt to disengage and decide to go live in a cabin in the woods off the grid, the irs and any number of other agencies will go after you and your loved ones for doing basic human things like having and raising kids in a non-sanctioned way. so is there really any practical alternative to just voicing dissent?

The alternative is corporations stealing your work with no recourse.

There are two broad classes of software people write.

One is general purpose software used by significant numbers of people. This is the sort of software that could be, should be, and often already is open source. Enough people use it to sustain a community around maintaining it, and then you don't have to deal with the overhead and rent seeking incentives created by proprietary software. Obvious advantage: No more ads in the start menu.

The other is custom code. Here "IP protection" is pretty worthless, because the company employing you is the only one that wants or uses the thing, or they're a SaaS company not interested in publishing or licensing the code to anyone else anyway.

Neither of these has a strong need for IP laws and moreover either of them would do fine under a regime where copyright terms last 14 years, there is no extrajudicial DMCA takedown process or anti-circumvention law and software patents don't exist, but you can still sue a company that violates the GPL or fails to pay you for services rendered.

It's more like "you criticize society, but vote for its destruction". It's fine having those views, but it's "curious" how those same views go against the incentive structure for making new technology.

That can be understandable in other communities with diehard FOSS folk. But this place is a a startup incubator. Clearly appealing more to the entrepreneurial side of industry.

I'm not opposed to reforms to the current system, it's far from perfect.

Both of the cases you mentioned have an important need for IP law.

> your comment sounds like you believe there is a real alternative to criticize yet participate

You have this exactly backwards. That belief is in a quote. idle_zealot is attributing that bad opinion to __loam, as a kind of paraphrasing.

thank you for explaining and sorry i totally missed the reference…

> Both of the cases you mentioned have an important need for IP law.

Do they?

BSD licensed software exists even though it waives pretty much all of the IP rights. If that was so important then how does it exist without it?

There is a huge industry of people integrating various business systems together. It's a huge industry because of the combinatorial explosion of interactions between different systems, which means that every integration is different, which in turn means that the whole question of copying is moot because each one is only useful to that specific company. You can't copy it, you have to do another one because the next customer has different requirements. What does it matter whether the law prohibits copying something nobody was going to copy anyway?