this post was submitted on 16 Dec 2024
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Exactly. Planned obsolesce is an annoyance to my pocketbook. Violations of my privacy can completely screw me over for life.
We should absolutely solve both, but if I had to pick one, I'd go for privacy every time.
It's connected. When there's no planned obsolescence, one can stop buying electronics until companies or some specific company regains reason. When there is planned obsolescence, you can't easily start ignoring the vendor, usually. Your device quickly becomes both dangerous and kinda useless without support.
This requires sort of an Ulysses' pact from companies. Sun would do such things. Sun would also develop fundamentally important technologies for literally every level of the industry. Unfortunately Sun went down.
And the way many companies went down in late 90s and 00s, I can't blame others for trying to find some way to exist without such unfortunate events. One can't rely on Ulysses' pacts anyway. Those work to a limited extent when supported by other mechanisms.
It's really a case of philosophy being required to find the solution. Not conflicting interests, to which (even in theory, with dialectics on one side's extreme and fascism on another's) both left and right movements reduce reality.
Said philosophy is that property rights are intended to share either finite resources or unique resources, and information is not a finite resource, however it is a unique resource.
The "conflicting interests" point of view means that everything unique should be a property and this is how things are done well, that means that everything has an owner who feeds from it, and a crowd of angry apes who think that fighting IP and copyright is evil theft making hardworking people hungry.
The "philosophy" point of view means that only finite resources should have owners, because ownership is a way for those who need a resource to have it, nothing more. Ownership and markets are a distribution mechanism, where those applying more energy to get a resource get more of it. It's superficial for things which are not finite, and superficial means "bad".
However work to develop new things and creation are finite resources. But those can actually be commodified. Trade secrets are the way it was called for all of history.
Patents allow rapid modernization and scale, which is an advantage over trade secrets, but patents can be issued for practical time periods, instead of practically indefinite, as it is now.
But I think for a decade or so the Western world can exist without patents at all, before reintroducing them in that improved form. It's not hard to notice that in the current global economy IP and patents are one of the most powerful assets of the West, so it may seem a leap of faith. But it has to be done. Patents in such a situation are derived from human work, so the "designing" countries won't lose strength compared to the "manufacturing" countries. The power is not in the patents. It's roughly similar to the way decolonization in the XX century counterintuitively revitalized old empires when and where done softly and hurt them when and where done harshly.
This has almost nothing to do with privacy and misses the point behind planned obsolescence. The goal behind both are the same: maximize recurring revenue. The goal behind patents is different: obstruct competition. Fixing one has almost no impact on the others.
Patents aren't "practically indefinite," they're 20 years (15 for design patents). I don't think that's egregious, but I do think it's a little too long, especially since there's no requirement to actually produce the thing.
My preference is 5 years, with renewal if they can prove they're building the thing and need more time, or have built the thing but need an extension to recoup R&D (i.e. renew from date of release). If they're not building the thing or intentionally delaying, renewal should be denied.
That doesn't help planned obsolescence or privacy at all, because neither is particularly related to patents.
Obstructing competition has impact on every agreed policy, first. Second, it obviously has direct impact in maximizing revenue.
20 years ago some people in developing countries still used DOS.
My preference would be just 5 years with no conditionals. Simpler things are harder to abuse.
That's stupid, sorry. Like saying tanks are not related to air force. They are components of the same system.
I don't see your point. I've seen DOS used in inventory systems in developed countries, and any patents related to DOS expired 25 years ago. Patents aren't why developing countries use old tech, in fact most don't enforce or even recognise US patents (or any IP law, for that matter).
What you seem to be talking about is copyright law, which is a completely different topic.
If patents are too simple, they'll be ineffective at actually solving valid business concerns and companies will just lobby for longer protections. Pharmaceuticals, for example, often need longer than 5 years to get a product to market, and creating a generic drug from a patent can take much less time and can piggyback off the studies the original company went through and get fast-tracked through the regulatory process. If they're able to reset the clock when they go to market, they may be okay with a shorter duration.
Any policy change needs to balance the very real concerns of all interested parties.
Only in the very abstract sense of trying to sell more stuff.
But patents have nothing to do with the main areas of planned obsolescence people are annoyed at, like TVs, laptops/phones, software, etc. Nor do they have anything to do with privacy issues people are concerned about, like Microsoft Recall, data breaches, or data brokers. It's a completely separate system from any of those concerns.
I mean normal people for daily stuff still used DOS sometimes. As an idea of how long 20 years is. OK. 20 years ago people were renting VHS tapes. 20 years ago Revenge of the Sith came out.
It's not a different topic, it's about patents expiring fast enough to not allow an entrenched oligopoly, but not fast enough to make innovation not worth it.
5 years after market entry, OK.
Yes and no, balance of concerns leads to something like politics, with no principle at all, just power games. It's what we have now.
Reducing competitiveness is pretty directly connected to planned obsolescence. It's possible because of oligopoly and because of a few companies making the fashion of what one can use in year 2024 and what is from year 2004 and isn't normal.