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February 7, 2025 — If you've thought deeply about copyrights and patents, you've probably figured out that they are bad for progress and deeply unjust. This post is for you.
(If you are new to this issues, you might be more interested in my other posts on Intellectual Freedom)
A Proposal
I suggest we organize around a simple long-term vision of passing a new Amendment to the U.S. Constitution ending patents and copyrights once and for all.
The below proposal is 34 words.
Section 1. Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of this Constitution is hereby repealed. Section 2. Congress shall make no law granting monopolies on ideas, knowledge, or inventions, or prohibiting the free use thereof.
I have only passed a handful of Amendments to the U.S. Constitution in my lifetime 😉, so discussion welcome.
Notes
I am not 100% certain that if we abolished copyright and patent systems the world would be a better place.
It would be intellectually dishonest of me to say that. I am always open to intelligent experiments that would show otherwise.
But at this point I am 99% confident it would be the single most massive positive improvement we can make in our world, based on empirical evidence and theoretical math.
It would take a lot of thought to do it right, but I know we could pull the transition off without as much disruption as people fear.
The bigger problem is this debate is not being had.
The problem is our side needs a better starting position.
When the debate is on details like what is the ideal length of monopolies, or when illogical terms like "Intellectual Property" are used, you've already conceded too much, and are giving up your strongest weapon: truth.
A stronger and more logical place to have the debate is upstream of that: debate whether we should have these systems at all.
I think the Amendment Strategy is clear enough, concrete enough, simple enough that you could get critical mass and start moving the debate upstream.
The best defense is a good offense. It's an adage, but there's usually some truth to adages.
You can honestly say The Bill of Rights outlaws copyright, but let's pass the IFA just to be clear.
I failed Aaron two times. The first when I was working with him to run his Python scripts at Duke (I was a new programmer at the time and pinged him with many questions). The second was when I did nothing when he was being prosecuted for liberating ideas to liberate minds. I will not fail him a third time.
The kind of people I think may be ready to organize would be lovers of open source, Linux, Sci-Hub, the Internet Archive, OG Napster; the followers of Aaron Swartz, Alexandra Elbakian and Stephan Kinsella; and all that truly love ideas and believe every human should get their own copy of humanity's most intelligent information.