You are viewing a single thread.
View all comments View context
13 points

You are correct. There would be no copyrights or patents in a free market.

permalink
report
parent
reply
6 points

Yeah, the huge companies would dominate over small companies even more than they already do.

permalink
report
parent
reply
8 points

Copyrights and patents are literally government enforced monopolies for huge companies. Without them, there would be a lot more competition.

permalink
report
parent
reply
9 points

Really? Calling it a government enforced monopoly seems very disingenuous.

Good luck trying to make a movie without Disney stealing it or making an invention with really effective solar panels or something without the biggest companies stealing it and bankrupt the original creator.

Copyright and patents protect everyone involved in creation and while there are a LOT of problems with the systems. Removing it entirely seems like the biggest overcorrection possible.

permalink
report
parent
reply
2 points

Or trade secrets. “Perfect information” is a bitch. Not to speak of “perfectly rational actors”: Say goodbye to advertisement, too, we’d have to outlaw basically all of it.

permalink
report
parent
reply
2 points
*

Trade secrets don’t need to be enforced much by law. You can create an ad hoc trade secret regime by simply keeping your secret between a few key employees. As it happens, there are some laws that go beyond that to help companies keep the secret, but that only extends something that could happen naturally.

permalink
report
parent
reply
1 point

To get closer to the free market there would have to be a duty to disclose any- and everything that’s now a trade secret, no matter how easily kept. To not just get closer but actually get there we all would need to be telepathic. As said, perfect information is a bitch of a concept.

permalink
report
parent
reply
1 point
*

To be fair, we absolutely should outlaw at least 99% of all currently practiced forms of advertising and make it so that new forms of advertising have to be whitelisted by a panel of psychiatrists, sociologists, environmentalists and urban planners before they’re allowed.

permalink
report
parent
reply
1 point

Are you telling me that the axioms behind the simplistic model are wrong?? shocked-pikachu.jpg

permalink
report
parent
reply
1 point

It’s not so much that they’re wrong is that they’re impossible in practice. Axioms, by their very nature, cannot be justified from within the system that they serve so “true” or “false” aren’t really applicable.

The model does have its justification, “given these axioms, we indeed get perfect allocation of resources”, that’s not wrong it’s a mathematical truth, and there’s a strain of liberalism (ordoliberalism) which specifically says “the state should regulate so that the actually existing market more closely approximates this mythical free market unicorn”, which is broadly speaking an immensely sensible take and you’ll have market socialists nodding in agreement, yep, that’s a good idea.

And then there’s another strain (neoliberalism) which basically says “lul we’ll tell people that ‘free market’ means ‘unregulated market’ so we can be feudal lords and siphon off infinite amounts of resources from the plebs”.

permalink
report
parent
reply

Technology

!technology@lemmy.world

Create post

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each other!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
  10. Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.

Approved Bots


Community stats

  • 17K

    Monthly active users

  • 14K

    Posts

  • 597K

    Comments