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lucidfox comments on Polarized gamma rays and manifest infinity - Less Wrong
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Be precise. Do you mean galactic patent law, galactic copyright law, or galactic trademark law?
I suppose we'll find out when we reach a high enough tech level to be able to build our own halting oracles, and promptly get sued. If the lawsuit rests on a claim that we reverse engineered the one we bought, it must be copyright law; if the lawsuit doesn't even need to claim that, it must be patent law.
Under galactic law, the prosecution presents a weighted distribution over possible charges, claims, and arguments, and the weights are hyperreal quaternions.
(Not really, of course. The truth will be far stranger than that.)
I see no reason to think that galactic law will resemble ours. Extremely vague concepts like "intellectual property" are about as close of an analogy as we're likely to get.
That was a joke on my part, but one warning against using overly general umbrella terms. Our copyright and patent laws developed as a result of certain historical circumstances, and it is entirely possible that a hypothetical alien civilization would treat sharing and distribution of ideas entirely differently and not resembling any of our historical precedents.
I would certainly hope so! For that matter, I hope future human civilization will treat it differently as well. (I'd like to replace hope with am confident, but alas I'm not quite that much of an optimist.)
Scratch your pessimism by saying that it could well get worse than it currently is. History simply does not bear out things staying the same over time.
Quite.