> Of course those companies hold copyrights and patents, and defend them, because that's the legal environment they're operating in.
Yes, that's the thing I'm arguing against. Would you mind considering it for a moment?
> No, if you are participating in a free market, and a corporation is the most efficient way to provide what you want to buy, then you will end up buying it from the corporation.
That's how corporations immediately outcompete individuals. The argument that a corporation should not be treated as an individual is irrelevant, because that is its role in a marketplace. That's who individuals directly compete with!
> Second, corporations like Google, Meta, Amazon, Apple, etc., as they are now, are creatures of government favoritism, not a free market.
They are creatures in a market. Whether that market is free does not define them, only their opportunity. I agree that they get the opportunity of government favoritism, and that that is a significant part of the issue. My point is that it is not the root cause of the problem. In a "free market" that incorporates copyright and patents, any corporation who owns IP can leverage it as a moat, enforced by state violence. The fact that any individual can do the same does not change the power imbalance between an individual and a corporation: it increases it.
Each of the corporations you mentioned leverages a copyright moat as their core valuation. Even Amazon's anticompetitive behavior is predicated on their vertical integration of Amazon the delivery/fulfillment service with Amazon the marketplace. The fact that a marketplace can be owned at all is predicated on copyright.
How so? As I understand it, their terms of service (which of course nobody reads, but they're there) say that anything you post on their sites becomes their property, not yours.
> proprietary software: a category predicated on copyright
No, predicated on not letting other people see the source code. That would be true even if copyrights didn't exist.
> that's the thing I'm arguing against
I'm quite willing to consider arguments against copyrights and patents. But I don't think "abolishing copyrights and patents will make the tech giants behave, or at least take away a bunch of their power" is such an argument. As I said in my previous post, as long as they continue to get the government favoritism they have now, they won't care if copyrights and patents are abolished.
> That's how corporations immediately outcompete individuals.
Again, "corporations" is an extremely broad term. A mom and pop restaurant is a corporation. And yes, it "outcompetes individuals" in the sense that a restaurant where one person tried to do every single task probably wouldn't work very well. But that doesn't make the corporation formed to operate the mom and pop restaurant a bad thing.
> Each of the corporations you mentioned leverages a copyright moat as their core valuation.
I disagree, for reasons I've already given, but I don't see that we're going to resolve that here. I simply don't see copyrights as a significant moat for the big tech giants compared to the other thumbs that are on the scale in their favor.
Yes. Is there something confusing about what I said about that? They own the copyright for your data, and leverage that copyright to isolate your social interactions into their ad platform moat.
> No, predicated on not letting other people see the source code. That would be true even if copyrights didn't exist.
Yes and no. Copyright also disallows us from de-compiling something and publishing any changes. As an aside, if I ever get this subjective computing idea to work (or LLMs pan out), that distinction will be gone, too...
The main argument, though, is that the data, not the platform itself, is what is monopolized. It doesn't matter what software you use to play a video file (Netflix), buy a book (Amazon), or chat with your friends (Facebook), so long as those interactions can be monopolized. Copyright facilitates just that by enforcing the ownership of the data.
> Again, "corporations" is an extremely broad term.
Yes, so? A mom & pop business is not an individual. A fortune 500 company is not an individual. Is one worse than the other? Certainly. Is one a different category of thing? No. That's the point. The individual is not liberated in a marketplace where they must join (or fail to compete with) a corporation.
> I disagree, for reasons I've already given
You disagree that Amazon leverages their ownership of market listing copyrights to facilitate their private ownership of the Amazon marketplace? What else are they?
I don't disagree with your other complaints, but they all seem to be predicated on Amazon already existing as a profitable business with a strong enough political position to abuse. Is that not the case?
> but I don't see that we're going to resolve that here.
Isn't my perspective worth your consideration at all? This whole time, you have centered your focus on nitpicking what a libertarian believes, or what you believe to be the important problem. Do I get a turn? If not, why bother commenting?