I just ordered a $25 development board from China that has an ESP32, 4G LTE, GPS, battery management, and open-source everything. It ships with full schematics. The company WANTS you to hack it, modify it, build on it, to do literally everything and anything to it.
This shouldn’t exist under the IP regime we’re told is “necessary for innovation.”
But it does exist. And it’s fucking incredible.
So let’s talk about why everything you’ve been told about intellectual property is a lie. How IP was created to protect individual creators and authors, and how it was driven to what it is today by corporations.
Someone explain this to me: How do you “steal” information?
If I have an apple and you take it, I don’t have an apple anymore. That’s theft. Clear harm.
If I have an idea and you “copy” it, I STILL HAVE THE IDEA. Nothing was taken from me. We just decided to make it illegal to share information freely.
Information isn’t scarce. It costs nothing to copy. IP law creates artificial scarcity where none exists naturally, then uses the violence of the state to enforce it.
That’s not protecting innovation. It’s greed.
We’re told IP is necessary to incentivize innovation. Without patents and copyrights, nobody would create anything, right?
Bullshit.
My high school friend lost someone to sarcoma. Now he’s going into cancer research. Not because he’s thinking about patent royalties. But because he wants to cure fucking cancer. He knows the pain he went through, and he doesn’t want anyone else to have to experience that.
That’s what actually drives innovation:
Money is a side effect, not the driver. And research backs this up, intrinsic motivation is MUCH BETTER than extrinsic motivation for creative work.
What would happen without IP? Let’s take a look at some existing examples.
Fashion industry: No IP protection. $2.5 trillion industry. Constant innovation. Trends evolve rapidly because everyone can iterate on everyone else’s designs.
Open source software: Explicitly anti-IP. Runs the entire internet. Linux beat Unix. Blender is free and competes with thousand-dollar per license software. The best tools are open.
Shenzhen hardware ecosystem: Weak IP enforcement. Result? My $25 board with features that would cost $500 from a US company. Rapid iteration. Accessible technology.
Ibuprofen: Patent expired. Now anyone can make it. Costs pennies. Did pain reliever innovation stop? No. People kept researching because THAT’S WHAT HUMANS DO.
The pattern is clear: weak or no IP = faster innovation, cheaper products, accessible technology.
Standard counter-argument: drug development costs billions, without patents nobody would fund it.
Let me break down why that’s wrong:
Public funding already pays for most research. NIH funds the risky early stuff. Pharma swoops in for profitable late-stage development. They’re privatizing gains from socialized research.
The current system is failing. Insulin discovered in 1921, still expensive. Orphan diseases ignored (not profitable). Antibiotics underdeveloped (not profitable). IP optimizes for profit, not health.
Alternative models exist. Prize funds. Public drug development. Crowdfunding. University research with public manufacturing. We just don’t try them because pharma lobbies to keep the patent monopoly.
My cancer researcher friend isn’t motivated by patents. Why assume pharma researchers are? (They’re not. Pharma executives are.)
Some people say “we just need reform, better balance, weaker IP.”
No. I’m calling it now: all or nothing.
Here’s why weak IP doesn’t work:
The Original copyright was 14 years. Now it is Life + 70 years (thanks, Disney)
Every time we try “reform,” corporations lobby and make it STRONGER. Patent trolls write patent reform. Disney writes copyright law. Pharma writes pharma regulations.
You can’t have “a little bit” of IP monopoly. Monopolists always want more monopoly. They have the money to lobby. The ratchet only turns one way.
The only stable states are:
Reform just slows the slide. Abolition is the only way to break the cycle.
Some people call IP abolition “radical.” But lets look at the basic evidence:
Small Tangent About this: When Asahi Linux, the free and open source project to run linux on Apple Silicon, shipped their first GPU drivers in December 2022, mediocre performance was expected from the reverse engineered code running against Apple’s ‘highly optimized’ Metal API. But in March 2023, those expectation lay in ruins. The Asahi team was running Xonotic, the FOSS Quake-like FPS shooter, at over 800 FPS on an M2 MacBook Air, while macOS managed only around 600 FPS on identical hardware. A 33% performance advantage for the reverse engineered drivers over Apple’s own implementation.
P.S I am working on a big blog post telling the whole story of Asahi linux, its really fascinating, so stay tuned for that, considering following my Blog’s RSS feed :)
What’s actually radical is saying “we should create artificial scarcity for non-scarce goods and enforce it with state violence, despite evidence this hinders innovation.”
I’m just saying: let’s… not do that.
IP law doesn’t protect individual creators. It protects:
When’s the last time IP helped a small creator against a big corporation? It doesn’t. The small creator can’t afford lawyers. The system serves power. One of the most recent examples being the unethical theft of all artist’s and writer’s works to train AI. (LLMs and ImageGen)
I am working on a signal jamming detection project right now, and it exists solely because:
This is what innovation looks like without IP strangling it.
And honestly it’s beautiful.