Kind of just felt like sparking a discussion thread and thought this might be an interesting one.
For me personally, one of, if not, my most controversial takes is that I will associate with anyone. Regardless of their opinions of if I personally find their opinions to be disgusting or revolting. I will give anyone respect who gives me respect.
Another one which I’ve expressed here before is that I do not think someone simply being a pedophile automatically makes them a pure evil child abuser who can’t help but rape every child that they see. And that some people can have this affliction and not actively seek out abusive content or attempt abusive actions.
My opinions on loli/shota/cub are also fairly controversial, but I imagine those are mostly shared by the majority of people here.
That should probably get us started pretty good!
So, What’s a controversial take that you have that most people would disagree with?
Feel free to have peaceful discussions about other people’s responses.
The intellectual property system is the reason we can’t have nice things.
I definitely think the intellectual property system is super broken and is made to be abused rather than simply protecting creators/creative works.
You say that, but British company ARM designs the processors we use in all our mobile devices and successfully licences them out to companies like Samsung and Qualcomm. Also, Gilette invented the best razor in 1908 (the double edged safety razor), patented it and now the patent is in the public domain, still made today by anyone who wants to.
Copyright law is the one that causes all the problems, but copyright does not make up all of IP law.
The ARM example is kind of funny for me due to personal experience. There’s a game called ComPressure, which was originally designed by one of its employees as a recruiting tool. It’s complicated enough to crush Notch’s brain and make him feel dumb, and the developer extends job interview offers to anyone who completes it. The free demo contains the full game… and i’ve deliberately chosen not to finish it despite being the top player in one of its leaderboards.
Originally this was so i could focus on graduating first, but that still hasn’t happened several years later, during which SoftBank ordered a hiring freeze and tried to squeeze out more licensing fees from its customers, who immediately scrambled to RISC-V because they’ve realized the risk in sticking with licensing ARM.
As for razors - the double-edged safety razor was an obvious extension of the single edged safety razor design patented in 1880. Even though the patent expired, Gilette still tried to evergreen it. They got a patent for another improvement to that design (reinforcing the corners of its cap to reduce the likelihood of damage to them) and immediately used that to unsucessfully sue another blade manufacturer for trimming corner pieces of their blades so they could fit that design.
The ease of obtaining a patent, extending its duration with tangential improvements and drowning completely unrelated uses is enough of a problem to make a game developer realize spending multiple times the settlement cost in fighting the patent and making a documentary about it was cheaper in the long run.
Besides copyright and patent law, there’s also trademark law (which i believe may be used in the future to indefinitely extend copyright) and military law (mostly the red cross making illegal use of its trademarks equivalent to a war crime, but also used to supress inventions). The only way i’ve seen this skirted around successfully was with Kenneth Shoulders publishing a book disclosing his findings on ultrafast high-voltage electric discharges to random people he knew nothing about prior to filing a patent on that.
I think in particular, the US itself seems to be very anal about IP law. no other country really has the overprotectiveness of IP that allow people to sue each other for works that’s similar to each others like the US does. Fraud, sure- but looking and sounding similar? Only in the US.