Word is, it's because OpenAI, the ChatGPT company, bought 40% of the world's RAM raw materials capacity for a period of time Related, Crucial is shutting down — because Micron wants to sell its...
Samsung subsidiaries are, naturally, going to look to Samsung Semiconductor first when they need parts. Such was reportedly the case for Samsung Electronics, in search of memory supplies for its newest smartphones as the company ramps up production for 2026 flagship designs. But with so much RAM hardware going into new “AI” data centers—and those companies willing to pay top dollar for their hardware—memory manufacturers like Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron are prioritizing data center suppliers to maximize profits.
The end result, according to a report from SE Daily spotted by SamMobile, is that Samsung Semiconductor rejected the original order for smartphone DRAM chips from Samsung Electronics’ Mobile Experience division. The smartphone manufacturing arm of the company had hoped to nail down pricing and supply for another year. But reports say that due to “chipflation,” the phone-making division must renegotiate quarterly, with a long-term supply deal rejected by its corporate sibling. A short-term deal, with higher prices, was reportedly hammered out.
Assuming that this information is accurate—and to be clear, we can’t independently confirm it—consumers will see prices rise for Samsung phones and other mobile hardware.
I really wonder what will happen to all that infrastructure and parts after all the bubble bursts. Though I'm not looking forward to the fallout, especially if it will interact with the other...
I really wonder what will happen to all that infrastructure and parts after all the bubble bursts. Though I'm not looking forward to the fallout, especially if it will interact with the other (economic) issues in the USA in particular. That said, the longer the burst gets delayed, the harder the fallout may be. <_<;
I don’t see that happening for datacenters that have gone online. Maybe for the ones they stopped work on while under construction. Not by the big tech firms though; they think long-term and will...
I don’t see that happening for datacenters that have gone online. Maybe for the ones they stopped work on while under construction. Not by the big tech firms though; they think long-term and will just delay construction.
I’m reminded of Google’s downtown San Jose campus: approved in 2021, construction paused in 2023. Perhaps they will still build it someday?
In a sane world, just because a company has a lot of money, they shouldn't be able to cause shortages for literally everybody else. We should have gaurdrails on these incredibly hard to source...
In a sane world, just because a company has a lot of money, they shouldn't be able to cause shortages for literally everybody else.
We should have gaurdrails on these incredibly hard to source parts. We don't let scalpers buy every single concert ticket, pretty sure we should't let the least profitable company of all time buy half of the second most critical computing computing component and kneecap every other sector.
I agree, but sadly it’s par for the course. Another historical example is Softsoap, where the company monopolized production of plastic liquid pumps in order to make sure nobody else could sell...
I agree, but sadly it’s par for the course. Another historical example is Softsoap, where the company monopolized production of plastic liquid pumps in order to make sure nobody else could sell their liquid soaps to compete.
Either way, if it takes borderline extortion to get their product to market.... The AI feels a bit like that. I don't want it in every nookand cranny, but every provider seems determined to...
Either way, if it takes borderline extortion to get their product to market....
The AI feels a bit like that. I don't want it in every nookand cranny, but every provider seems determined to pretend it's actually increasing engagement.
(also, if RAM were held back a full year pretty sure there would be a full government takeover of somebody)
I'd argue, though, that you need to zoom out a little bit and think in terms of systems. Let's take the softsoap case. How will other manufacturers react? By spooling up new production lines,...
I'd argue, though, that you need to zoom out a little bit and think in terms of systems. Let's take the softsoap case.
In 1980, entrepreneur Robert R. Taylor began selling pump soap under "Softsoap" through his company, The Minnetonka Corporation, located in Chaska, Minnesota. To give the product exclusivity in the marketplace, he purchased 100 million hand-pumped plastic bottles – a year's production capacity from the only two domestic manufacturers – so no one else could release a similar product during that time. Within six months, he had sold $25 million worth of Softsoap. He sold the brand to Colgate-Palmolive in 1987.
How will other manufacturers react? By spooling up new production lines, creating a greater supply of soap bottles, and ultimately the consumer comes out ahead. We can see that this is effectively what happened by the fact that Colgate/Palmolive does not continue to buy the country's entire supply of soap bottles each year and that there are many liquid soap varieties available to the public (because now many manufacturers make many bottles for many soap producers). It's a win/win. The entrepreneur has created value that didn't exist before (a new product that people want and which demonstrably makes things better), the bottle manufacturers sell out their entire supply (which helps their own businesses), people get soap.
What about the converse? People are arguing here that the government should prevent this. Fine, it's a nice platitude, but how does that actually work in practice when we zoom out and think in systems? We appoint a plastic bottle czar to make sure nobody is buying too much of the supply? How many millions of these functionaries will we need for all sectors of the economy? And now we've removed all incentive for the original entrepreneurship (the competitive advantage was what allowed the soap company to get off the ground in the first place), handicapped the bottle manufacturer (by introducing regulatory load that they have to negotiate), and ultimately made it less likely that value will be created.
Capitalism has problems. A lot of bad things happen pretty frequently. But we need to be sure not to throw the baby out with the bathwater and not to say "the government should step in" whenever something happens that at first glance seems a little mean.
The government needs to protect common resources, the environment, the welfare of the consumer, prevent monopolies, all kinds of stuff. But "one company bought all the soap bottles" or "one company bought 40% of the RAM" is not any of those things. Trying to prevent that would certainly make things much worse.
I used the soap as a simplified example but there are countless other examples in technology where I think that intervention is needed. Colgate-Palmolive does not continue to buy out all...
I used the soap as a simplified example but there are countless other examples in technology where I think that intervention is needed. Colgate-Palmolive does not continue to buy out all production of plastic pumps but Apple does buy out all of TSMC’s production of each new production process they make. Beyond that technology companies who make microchips and related technology are protected by an unfair innovation stifling doctrine of trade secrets which allows them to have monopolies of essentially infinite length for their niches. There’s essentially only one company who can make the lithography machinery that the entire industry depends on, for example. Chip fabs have processes that nobody else has access to or even understands fully how to implement, and countless small designers have gone defunct because they don’t have a means of outspending the big boy’s R&D budget and can’t go through an open development model because the same people would just steal all of their work, bring it to market faster, and crush them.
I won’t say that making tech development completely open would lead to a better market or world; I don’t think it’s possible to predict all of the effects of such a major change. But I do think that relaxing some of the IP protections that we give some of the world’s largest corporations could make things better for everyone. That includes copyright as well.
For what it's worth, conventional economic doctrine holds that the ability to protect a trade secret/copyright spurs innovation, not stifles it. The idea is that there's an incentive to create new...
unfair innovation stifling doctrine of trade secrets
For what it's worth, conventional economic doctrine holds that the ability to protect a trade secret/copyright spurs innovation, not stifles it. The idea is that there's an incentive to create new technology if you know you can profit from it.
There’s essentially only one company who can make the lithography machinery that the entire industry depends on, for example
I would take this example in the complete opposite direction. I think there's a very strong argument that the only reason extreme UV lithography exists at all is because ASML was willing to take the risk of spending billions on R&D because they could protect the resulting technology via copyright.
Now, copyright isn't the only protection that ASML has. Just like when TSMC tried to move factories to America and found that a lot of their secret sauce was linked to intangibles like cultural capital, I think it's unlikely that even someone who stole ASML's tech could produce an exact copy of their results. (We know this because Chinese SOEs almost certainly did steal it and aren't able to precisely copy it.)
But without copyright, I don't think we get lots of little EUV manufacturers. I think what happens is we don't discover EUV at all.
Practically no school of capitalist economic theory holds that copyright should exist (trade secrets are arguably different because those are things that can just be stored in your head, you are...
For what it's worth, conventional economic doctrine holds that the ability to protect a trade secret/copyright spurs innovation, not stifles it. The idea is that there's an incentive to create new technology if you know you can profit from it.
Practically no school of capitalist economic theory holds that copyright should exist (trade secrets are arguably different because those are things that can just be stored in your head, you are under no obligation to supply competitors with your knowledge). Most capitalist theory argues that all markets trend to zero economic profit in the long term, with economic profit only being possible in the short term. Therefore, being first-to-market is all the economic advantage one should get, allowing you the ability to have realized profit before competitors can spin up production.
Economically speaking, from a capitalist perspective, ASML would have spent billions of dollars without copyright because there was money to be made. They do not continue R&D because they hold a copyright to their current technology, they continue R&D to continue to make money on future technologies (because, believe it or not, there could be a competitor that could enter the market, however unlikely). Unless you are a crony capitalist, you can only really argue that copyright stifles innovation as fewer competitors can enter the market at current levels - enforced by government decree. This means that if a competitor were to enter the market, they are already at a minimum <number of years copyright holds> years behind ASML and/or must spend an inordinate amount more money to innovate the next technology. While there certainly are a lot more intangibles, China's rejection of honoring copyright has arguably been an aspect of why they have been able to join the international community in manufacturing, even if they are still a few years behind in the engineering and innovation categories. To your example, sure they weren't able to precisely copy ASML's processes, but no one else can even try to copy the processes. Surely, that gives Chinese firms some level of advantage over any other potential entrant to the field. Similarly, sure Chinese produced GPUs are not yet at the level of Nvidia or AMD but the fact that they are producing any GPU is a step above practically any other firm (Intel aside... they have their own problems.)
Interestingly, one of the things most schools of economics might agree with is that copyright inherently leads to monopolies - they do likely disagree on whether that's a good thing or not!
I don't really know what to say in response to this other than to ask for clarification as to what you mean. Because taken literally, this is a patently false statement. E.g....
Practically no school of capitalist economic theory holds that copyright should exist
I don't really know what to say in response to this other than to ask for clarification as to what you mean. Because taken literally, this is a patently false statement.
Again, practically no school. You found a school - suspiciously with no authors quoted from their school of thought - that argues for copyright while acknowledging that the other four schools may...
Again, practically no school. You found a school - suspiciously with no authors quoted from their school of thought - that argues for copyright while acknowledging that the other four schools may believe that copyright is a "second best option." Also the paper starts by essentially saying "economics isn't a science," to make sure that it can ignore all the science that exists in economics. The affiliation of ITIF with many tech companies and the tech sector in general leaves a suspicious taste in my mouth as well that they should be so adamantly in favor of copyright.
Becuase to me, the actions of entertainment and then tech companies surrounding copyright over the last hundred years has soured the idea of copyright for me. While I strongly disagree with the notion that economics isn't a science, I can agree with Robert D. Atkinson in some ways that there exists an greater amount of personal philosophy within economics (I would argue that is because we went wide with the definition of economics a couple hundred years ago when we dropped the "political" from the field of "political economics" and just kind of said everything from hard numbers to political theory can be economics. I digress....) and, as something of a idealist and someone with a sense of fairness, I would like a copyright system that actually does benefit and protect creators in meaningful ways. Any ideas I have on copyright though, I argue fall outside my knowledge and training in economics and fall further into political or social justice. Most economic schools (arguably since the majority of the more well-known ones fall squarely under the flag of "capitalism") would argue that government intervention is an inefficiency introduced into the system.
And just kinda stream of consciousing here: copyright certainly isn't as economically dubious as patents but the two are in the same basket and that, without much better language to describe the situation, sucks. When we think patent and copyright, we think of defending the "little guy": the artist down the street, or the the garage inventor bringing new products to market. Unfortunately, we're stuck with giant, behemoth corporations abusing the systems to stifle innovation, to prevent the little guy (or even the big guy) from bringing new products to market. Or, with enough money, you don't need to worry about someone else's copyright, you can just infringe on it and drag it out in court. Or worse, you can keep taking others to court for "infringing" on copyright. One of the legitimate complaints regarding economics as a science is that studies are hard to conduct, but I would argue that the current system of copyright has been a long enough real-world study that we can call it a bad system.
Patents ARE the solution to companies hoarding trade secrets. You can’t stop a company from having secrets, but you can make a system where it’s more beneficial for them to disclose their...
Patents ARE the solution to companies hoarding trade secrets. You can’t stop a company from having secrets, but you can make a system where it’s more beneficial for them to disclose their production methods because the government will protect their right to demand terms from other firms that want to use it.
Patents are using the government's guns to make sure no one else can produce what you do. Just because a patent holder has to (sort of) disclose the process/product does not put them in any...
Patents are using the government's guns to make sure no one else can produce what you do. Just because a patent holder has to (sort of) disclose the process/product does not put them in any obligation to allow any other firm to use that process/product.
I agree with you, there is no way to stop a company from having secrets but using the government to protect those secrets is not a viable answer.
It doesn’t force them to share their design, but it makes it feasible. Secrets are a one way thing - there’s no way to prevent another company you share it with from using it indefinitely. With a...
It doesn’t force them to share their design, but it makes it feasible. Secrets are a one way thing - there’s no way to prevent another company you share it with from using it indefinitely.
With a patent, other firms can come and negotiate to license the design on mutually agreeable terms. This works because unlike secrets, the government’s ability to shut down the other company can be toggled on and off.
What is preventing companies from negotiating that without copyright? I see that a company has a technology I want and I have a couple options: license it or recreate it. Those options are the...
What is preventing companies from negotiating that without copyright? I see that a company has a technology I want and I have a couple options: license it or recreate it. Those options are the only two options in either system. The only difference with copyright is that the copyright holder can use the government's guns to prevent me from doing the latter.
That only works between two parties. Let’s say company A licenses their tech to company B. Company B leaks the tech, maliciously or not, to company C. Company A can try and sue company B for...
That only works between two parties. Let’s say company A licenses their tech to company B. Company B leaks the tech, maliciously or not, to company C. Company A can try and sue company B for negligence, but as company C is a completely unrelated party, there’s nothing company A can do about it.
Company A is going to be extremely careful in who it can do business with, and it’s just not possible in a world where companies can go bankrupt on a dime.
It’s also extremely cumbersome to have to make very intricate contracts to protect trade secrets with every partner company.
The nice part about patent law is that it’s global. Once you have the patent, it doesn’t matter how the other party got the tech (it is, in fact, usually public as part of the patent process).
Did I say something against patents? I’m not doing too well so sorry if I’m missing something here. Patents are fine, it’s the legal protection for trade secrets I’m against, as well as using...
Did I say something against patents? I’m not doing too well so sorry if I’m missing something here. Patents are fine, it’s the legal protection for trade secrets I’m against, as well as using copyright to protect tech IP.
Recently I was in the market to do some home PC upgrade and had similar run-ins with cost. I passed on it but I didn't look deep into the why - talk about eye opening! Wow.
Recently I was in the market to do some home PC upgrade and had similar run-ins with cost. I passed on it but I didn't look deep into the why - talk about eye opening! Wow.
My ram was 180€ and now is 1900€... It's a very specific example and similar other models are not 10x (probably closer to 3-5x), but its still mind-blowing.
My ram was 180€ and now is 1900€...
It's a very specific example and similar other models are not 10x (probably closer to 3-5x), but its still mind-blowing.
With the price of RAM ballooning, I thought I'd do a little research into prices over time. For anyone interested, I threw together this low-effort page that gathers up prices of 2x8 (16GB) kits...
With the price of RAM ballooning, I thought I'd do a little research into prices over time. For anyone interested, I threw together this low-effort page that gathers up prices of 2x8 (16GB) kits over time. I figured 16GB would be pretty standard for someone that just wants to build a gaming PC. Prices vary wildly for different kits (the 64GB kit I purchased 6 months ago has gone from $120 -> $500, a much larger increase compared to the 16GB kit increase). https://gallery.tomsdocs.com/ram/
I'll give the disclaimer that I used AI coding tools to write data extraction code (the source of the data is PNG graphs I grabbed from PC Part Picker). I realize there's a little bit of irony in analyzing RAM prices using the tools that are causing the RAM prices to increase...
Anyway, my layman's analysis is that the we've seen 3 big price spikes in the past 10 years. I'm no expert, this is really just guesswork. First in 2018, this was probably on account of interest in crypto causing CPU/GPU/RAM prices to spike. Then in 2021, likely due to the COVID supply-chain problems at the time. And the spike we're currently experiencing, obviously due to the AI companies buying up all of the RAM. I think its also important to note that RAM prices for DDR4 were at all-time lows at the start of 2025. It's also too soon to know if RAM prices will eventually fall back down to those prices or if they'll continue to climb or if these prices will become the new normal.
Think you could throw together something similar for DDR5? I remember trying to upgrade and build during the crypto boom. It was just as bad if not worse than right now.
Think you could throw together something similar for DDR5?
I remember trying to upgrade and build during the crypto boom. It was just as bad if not worse than right now.
Sometimes I wish I got 128GB instead of 64GB of RAM reading this… then I remember that I can’t even use my 64GB unless I use it for Steam Recording as a RAMdisk/tmpfs in Linux, but seeing my kit...
Sometimes I wish I got 128GB instead of 64GB of RAM reading this… then I remember that I can’t even use my 64GB unless I use it for Steam Recording as a RAMdisk/tmpfs in Linux, but seeing my kit ballooning in price from the side… yeah, RAM is quickly becoming the most expensive piece of hardware after GPUs(And it will probably get more expensive).
What an awful time to make a PC and what an even worse time to have something go bad in your PC.
I was running my air fryer the other day and tripped my breaker. Long story short, I went to shut down my PC and reset my UPS and while doing so, I heard a "poof-zap". Was a bit worried for a...
I was running my air fryer the other day and tripped my breaker. Long story short, I went to shut down my PC and reset my UPS and while doing so, I heard a "poof-zap".
Was a bit worried for a minute, but turns out it was just the UPS that blew and not any of my components. Pretty thankful for that, but I'm still not going to plug my PC back in until I get another UPS, which isn't cheap either.
Word is, it's because OpenAI, the ChatGPT company, bought 40% of the world's RAM raw materials capacity for a period of time
Related, Crucial is shutting down — because Micron wants to sell its RAM and SSDs to AI companies instead
I don't think I like this
A company buying 40% of RAM on borrowed money with a product that’s never turned a profit is a depressing reality to live in.
I really wonder what will happen to all that infrastructure and parts after all the bubble bursts. Though I'm not looking forward to the fallout, especially if it will interact with the other (economic) issues in the USA in particular. That said, the longer the burst gets delayed, the harder the fallout may be. <_<;
A good amount will still get used. But I do yearn for a future where I can pick up H100s for cheap.
I guess we could repurpose all those pending useless datacenters for storm shelters or something.
I don’t see that happening for datacenters that have gone online. Maybe for the ones they stopped work on while under construction. Not by the big tech firms though; they think long-term and will just delay construction.
I’m reminded of Google’s downtown San Jose campus: approved in 2021, construction paused in 2023. Perhaps they will still build it someday?
Ugh, this bubble can't burst fast enough.
The same RAM I bought one year ago for $120 is now retailing for $500. Is this the vaunted "free market economy" that so many seem to harp on about?
Honestly I don't really get the reason for the snark.
In a sane world, just because a company has a lot of money, they shouldn't be able to cause shortages for literally everybody else.
We should have gaurdrails on these incredibly hard to source parts. We don't let scalpers buy every single concert ticket, pretty sure we should't let the least profitable company of all time buy half of the second most critical computing computing component and kneecap every other sector.
I agree, but sadly it’s par for the course. Another historical example is Softsoap, where the company monopolized production of plastic liquid pumps in order to make sure nobody else could sell their liquid soaps to compete.
To be fair, that was for one year, as they were developing a new consumer product, on an item not a mainstay of modern civilization.
Either way, if it takes borderline extortion to get their product to market....
The AI feels a bit like that. I don't want it in every nookand cranny, but every provider seems determined to pretend it's actually increasing engagement.
(also, if RAM were held back a full year pretty sure there would be a full government takeover of somebody)
I'd argue, though, that you need to zoom out a little bit and think in terms of systems. Let's take the softsoap case.
How will other manufacturers react? By spooling up new production lines, creating a greater supply of soap bottles, and ultimately the consumer comes out ahead. We can see that this is effectively what happened by the fact that Colgate/Palmolive does not continue to buy the country's entire supply of soap bottles each year and that there are many liquid soap varieties available to the public (because now many manufacturers make many bottles for many soap producers). It's a win/win. The entrepreneur has created value that didn't exist before (a new product that people want and which demonstrably makes things better), the bottle manufacturers sell out their entire supply (which helps their own businesses), people get soap.
What about the converse? People are arguing here that the government should prevent this. Fine, it's a nice platitude, but how does that actually work in practice when we zoom out and think in systems? We appoint a plastic bottle czar to make sure nobody is buying too much of the supply? How many millions of these functionaries will we need for all sectors of the economy? And now we've removed all incentive for the original entrepreneurship (the competitive advantage was what allowed the soap company to get off the ground in the first place), handicapped the bottle manufacturer (by introducing regulatory load that they have to negotiate), and ultimately made it less likely that value will be created.
Capitalism has problems. A lot of bad things happen pretty frequently. But we need to be sure not to throw the baby out with the bathwater and not to say "the government should step in" whenever something happens that at first glance seems a little mean.
The government needs to protect common resources, the environment, the welfare of the consumer, prevent monopolies, all kinds of stuff. But "one company bought all the soap bottles" or "one company bought 40% of the RAM" is not any of those things. Trying to prevent that would certainly make things much worse.
I used the soap as a simplified example but there are countless other examples in technology where I think that intervention is needed. Colgate-Palmolive does not continue to buy out all production of plastic pumps but Apple does buy out all of TSMC’s production of each new production process they make. Beyond that technology companies who make microchips and related technology are protected by an unfair innovation stifling doctrine of trade secrets which allows them to have monopolies of essentially infinite length for their niches. There’s essentially only one company who can make the lithography machinery that the entire industry depends on, for example. Chip fabs have processes that nobody else has access to or even understands fully how to implement, and countless small designers have gone defunct because they don’t have a means of outspending the big boy’s R&D budget and can’t go through an open development model because the same people would just steal all of their work, bring it to market faster, and crush them.
I won’t say that making tech development completely open would lead to a better market or world; I don’t think it’s possible to predict all of the effects of such a major change. But I do think that relaxing some of the IP protections that we give some of the world’s largest corporations could make things better for everyone. That includes copyright as well.
For what it's worth, conventional economic doctrine holds that the ability to protect a trade secret/copyright spurs innovation, not stifles it. The idea is that there's an incentive to create new technology if you know you can profit from it.
I would take this example in the complete opposite direction. I think there's a very strong argument that the only reason extreme UV lithography exists at all is because ASML was willing to take the risk of spending billions on R&D because they could protect the resulting technology via copyright.
Now, copyright isn't the only protection that ASML has. Just like when TSMC tried to move factories to America and found that a lot of their secret sauce was linked to intangibles like cultural capital, I think it's unlikely that even someone who stole ASML's tech could produce an exact copy of their results. (We know this because Chinese SOEs almost certainly did steal it and aren't able to precisely copy it.)
But without copyright, I don't think we get lots of little EUV manufacturers. I think what happens is we don't discover EUV at all.
Practically no school of capitalist economic theory holds that copyright should exist (trade secrets are arguably different because those are things that can just be stored in your head, you are under no obligation to supply competitors with your knowledge). Most capitalist theory argues that all markets trend to zero economic profit in the long term, with economic profit only being possible in the short term. Therefore, being first-to-market is all the economic advantage one should get, allowing you the ability to have realized profit before competitors can spin up production.
Economically speaking, from a capitalist perspective, ASML would have spent billions of dollars without copyright because there was money to be made. They do not continue R&D because they hold a copyright to their current technology, they continue R&D to continue to make money on future technologies (because, believe it or not, there could be a competitor that could enter the market, however unlikely). Unless you are a crony capitalist, you can only really argue that copyright stifles innovation as fewer competitors can enter the market at current levels - enforced by government decree. This means that if a competitor were to enter the market, they are already at a minimum <number of years copyright holds> years behind ASML and/or must spend an inordinate amount more money to innovate the next technology. While there certainly are a lot more intangibles, China's rejection of honoring copyright has arguably been an aspect of why they have been able to join the international community in manufacturing, even if they are still a few years behind in the engineering and innovation categories. To your example, sure they weren't able to precisely copy ASML's processes, but no one else can even try to copy the processes. Surely, that gives Chinese firms some level of advantage over any other potential entrant to the field. Similarly, sure Chinese produced GPUs are not yet at the level of Nvidia or AMD but the fact that they are producing any GPU is a step above practically any other firm (Intel aside... they have their own problems.)
Interestingly, one of the things most schools of economics might agree with is that copyright inherently leads to monopolies - they do likely disagree on whether that's a good thing or not!
I don't really know what to say in response to this other than to ask for clarification as to what you mean. Because taken literally, this is a patently false statement.
E.g. https://www2.itif.org/2012-copyright-economic-doctrines.pdf
Again, practically no school. You found a school - suspiciously with no authors quoted from their school of thought - that argues for copyright while acknowledging that the other four schools may believe that copyright is a "second best option." Also the paper starts by essentially saying "economics isn't a science," to make sure that it can ignore all the science that exists in economics. The affiliation of ITIF with many tech companies and the tech sector in general leaves a suspicious taste in my mouth as well that they should be so adamantly in favor of copyright.
Becuase to me, the actions of entertainment and then tech companies surrounding copyright over the last hundred years has soured the idea of copyright for me. While I strongly disagree with the notion that economics isn't a science, I can agree with Robert D. Atkinson in some ways that there exists an greater amount of personal philosophy within economics (I would argue that is because we went wide with the definition of economics a couple hundred years ago when we dropped the "political" from the field of "political economics" and just kind of said everything from hard numbers to political theory can be economics. I digress....) and, as something of a idealist and someone with a sense of fairness, I would like a copyright system that actually does benefit and protect creators in meaningful ways. Any ideas I have on copyright though, I argue fall outside my knowledge and training in economics and fall further into political or social justice. Most economic schools (arguably since the majority of the more well-known ones fall squarely under the flag of "capitalism") would argue that government intervention is an inefficiency introduced into the system.
And just kinda stream of consciousing here: copyright certainly isn't as economically dubious as patents but the two are in the same basket and that, without much better language to describe the situation, sucks. When we think patent and copyright, we think of defending the "little guy": the artist down the street, or the the garage inventor bringing new products to market. Unfortunately, we're stuck with giant, behemoth corporations abusing the systems to stifle innovation, to prevent the little guy (or even the big guy) from bringing new products to market. Or, with enough money, you don't need to worry about someone else's copyright, you can just infringe on it and drag it out in court. Or worse, you can keep taking others to court for "infringing" on copyright. One of the legitimate complaints regarding economics as a science is that studies are hard to conduct, but I would argue that the current system of copyright has been a long enough real-world study that we can call it a bad system.
Patents ARE the solution to companies hoarding trade secrets. You can’t stop a company from having secrets, but you can make a system where it’s more beneficial for them to disclose their production methods because the government will protect their right to demand terms from other firms that want to use it.
Patents are using the government's guns to make sure no one else can produce what you do. Just because a patent holder has to (sort of) disclose the process/product does not put them in any obligation to allow any other firm to use that process/product.
I agree with you, there is no way to stop a company from having secrets but using the government to protect those secrets is not a viable answer.
It doesn’t force them to share their design, but it makes it feasible. Secrets are a one way thing - there’s no way to prevent another company you share it with from using it indefinitely.
With a patent, other firms can come and negotiate to license the design on mutually agreeable terms. This works because unlike secrets, the government’s ability to shut down the other company can be toggled on and off.
It’s a good system.
What is preventing companies from negotiating that without copyright? I see that a company has a technology I want and I have a couple options: license it or recreate it. Those options are the only two options in either system. The only difference with copyright is that the copyright holder can use the government's guns to prevent me from doing the latter.
What happens when one party decides to use the technology while breaking the license?
While breaking the license? Arbitration. That's a regular contract dispute.
My problem isn't with contract law. My problem is with the patent system.
That only works between two parties. Let’s say company A licenses their tech to company B. Company B leaks the tech, maliciously or not, to company C. Company A can try and sue company B for negligence, but as company C is a completely unrelated party, there’s nothing company A can do about it.
Company A is going to be extremely careful in who it can do business with, and it’s just not possible in a world where companies can go bankrupt on a dime.
It’s also extremely cumbersome to have to make very intricate contracts to protect trade secrets with every partner company.
The nice part about patent law is that it’s global. Once you have the patent, it doesn’t matter how the other party got the tech (it is, in fact, usually public as part of the patent process).
Did I say something against patents? I’m not doing too well so sorry if I’m missing something here. Patents are fine, it’s the legal protection for trade secrets I’m against, as well as using copyright to protect tech IP.
pssst, your braces are swapped :)
I may or may not still be sloshed from the vacation I just got back from. 😅
It's an unfortunate lack of understanding of economics that's gotten worse because we have political identities tied up in it.
Recently I was in the market to do some home PC upgrade and had similar run-ins with cost. I passed on it but I didn't look deep into the why - talk about eye opening! Wow.
I picked a really bad time to suggest we build a gaming computer together for the lads Christmas. Whoops.
My ram was 180€ and now is 1900€...
It's a very specific example and similar other models are not 10x (probably closer to 3-5x), but its still mind-blowing.
With the price of RAM ballooning, I thought I'd do a little research into prices over time. For anyone interested, I threw together this low-effort page that gathers up prices of 2x8 (16GB) kits over time. I figured 16GB would be pretty standard for someone that just wants to build a gaming PC. Prices vary wildly for different kits (the 64GB kit I purchased 6 months ago has gone from $120 -> $500, a much larger increase compared to the 16GB kit increase).
https://gallery.tomsdocs.com/ram/
I'll give the disclaimer that I used AI coding tools to write data extraction code (the source of the data is PNG graphs I grabbed from PC Part Picker). I realize there's a little bit of irony in analyzing RAM prices using the tools that are causing the RAM prices to increase...
Anyway, my layman's analysis is that the we've seen 3 big price spikes in the past 10 years. I'm no expert, this is really just guesswork. First in 2018, this was probably on account of interest in crypto causing CPU/GPU/RAM prices to spike. Then in 2021, likely due to the COVID supply-chain problems at the time. And the spike we're currently experiencing, obviously due to the AI companies buying up all of the RAM. I think its also important to note that RAM prices for DDR4 were at all-time lows at the start of 2025. It's also too soon to know if RAM prices will eventually fall back down to those prices or if they'll continue to climb or if these prices will become the new normal.
Think you could throw together something similar for DDR5?
I remember trying to upgrade and build during the crypto boom. It was just as bad if not worse than right now.
Archive link
Sometimes I wish I got 128GB instead of 64GB of RAM reading this… then I remember that I can’t even use my 64GB unless I use it for Steam Recording as a RAMdisk/tmpfs in Linux, but seeing my kit ballooning in price from the side… yeah, RAM is quickly becoming the most expensive piece of hardware after GPUs(And it will probably get more expensive).
What an awful time to make a PC and what an even worse time to have something go bad in your PC.
I was running my air fryer the other day and tripped my breaker. Long story short, I went to shut down my PC and reset my UPS and while doing so, I heard a "poof-zap".
Was a bit worried for a minute, but turns out it was just the UPS that blew and not any of my components. Pretty thankful for that, but I'm still not going to plug my PC back in until I get another UPS, which isn't cheap either.
I got 128GB of DDR4 in 2023 for ~$300 CAD. Would be well over $1000 now.