Well, OSE is a non-profit and their charter dictates giving away designs. Also, all the stuff OSE is working on is out of patent and can't be re-patented. "The Printerbot guy" derived his design from an open source design, so it's not an invention and can't receive patent protection. Same thing with Ultimaker and Makerbot. Also, I don't think "quite successful" means what you think it means. Arguably Makerbot is successful, but it's also brand new and hasn't proven anything about the sustainability of an open-source-based business plan.
I'm not saying people can't give their IP away if they want to. I'm just saying that one example of an artist increasing their fan base is irrelevant to pretty much all other forms of IP.
"I'm not convinced you can invent an Arduino (or anything else) if you can't build one. Maybe you build it by hiring other folks to work from your drawings, but I don't count anything as invented until it's functional and it has to be built before it can function."
Well, that's more of a semantics argument. The point is that it was your mind that conceived of the thing and defined how to bring it into being. That's great for you if it's art, not so great for you if it's engineering. Anything engineered can be reverse engineered (just ask China). Once something is reverse engineered, nobody needs you anymore. Sure, it might take a copycat a little longer to pay their own engineer to become an expert in your widget, but they can afford to because they're going to make money mass producing your widget. money they are not going to send to you. The idea that an engineer is going to gain enough personal fame to make some kind of income off of it is laughable. No one cares about engineers. Steve Jobs overshadowed several people who actually contributed to the world simply because he refuese to put buttons on his widgets.
I dunno, maybe it's possible. It just seems like it depends on the kindness of strangers...which isn't a thing I think economic theories should be based on.
Yeah, I think that as open source hardware branches out it's going to run into a lot of situations in which the concept is largely irrelevant. The primary benefit from open source information is that you don't need to search for or pay someone to educate you on the technology. In order to realize that benefit, you need to have lots of that same situation happening over and over again. There aren't many cement plants in the world period, let alone many new ones, and the cost of the information is nothing compared to the cost of building and running the thing. So the marginal benefit just isn't there.
"...IP is unnatural and unsustainable."
Everything humans do that makes them humans, rather than just another mammal, is unnatural. Everything that living things do, that makes them different from inanimate objects, is unsustainable. Technically, as far as any of us know, the natural world is unsutainable. So...philosophically I don't see a problem.
"In order to have intellectual property you must have a massive bureaucratic machine that will issue patents, provide judicial system and then enforce them by threat of violence (all of this going against the decentralized philosophy put forth)."
I suggest separating the open source concept from concepts like economics and politics. They're interrelated only in the same way that a butterfly and a hurricane are interrelated. Open source has much more to do with spare capacity and an innate motivation to donate that capacity then it does with a cultural revolution. Nothing is ever going to change the fact that the government already exists, so a patent system isn't a big leap. Arguably it's a pretty damned useful thing as long as it avoids scope creep (but that applies to every tool).
"By saying you can own an idea also means that you own the piece of someones brain that is holding that idea but this is ridiculous."
Correct. Which is why patents don't say that a person owns an idea. They only say that a person owns the right to profit from the manifestation of that idea for a certain period of time in return for clearly defining that idea for the world. There are plenty of great (and profitable) ideas that aren't, and will never be, patented. Keeping the idea secret is more profitable because the person who came up with the idea owns the means of profiting from that idea. Patents are not a way to shackle honest, hard-working people. They are a way to induce inventors to reveal their inventions so the whole world can benefit from them. The carrot is a short-term legal monopoly on licensing/producing that idea.
For what it's worth, I'm not going to read anything else by Mises until the person who refers to his work can actually explain it coherently.
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