161–170 of 371 posts
Most people support patents because they have this romanticized notion of some little guy in his garage inventing the next light bulb. That’s not representative of the mass offensive and defensive patterns of use by modern corporations. We should just end patents, period.
Most people support patents because they have this romanticized notion of some little guy in his garage inventing the next light bulb. That’s not representative of the mass offensive and defensive patterns of use by modern corporations. We should just end patents, period.
> The case against patents can be summarized briefly: there is no empirical evidence that they serve to increase innovation and productivity. There is strong evidence, instead, that patents have many negative consequences.
Most people support patents because they have this romanticized notion of some little guy in his garage inventing the next light bulb. That’s not representative of the mass offensive and defensive patterns of use by modern corporations. We should just end patents, period.
Patented seeds have funded GMO research which has saved literally hundreds of millions if not billions of lives through famine reduction. Yes it sucks for farmers, but I can't see how it has been anything other than absolute boon for humanity.
GMO crops have nothing to do with famine reduction.
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Patents are still being used to protect smaller companies from much larger corporations. Allowing these large corporations to legally ignore patents will only make things worse for the rest of us. If we need to reform patents, maybe it should be based on revenue generated. Once a company has been successfully "incentivized" for their "innovation" the patent expires sooner.
Can you give us an example where a smaller company was successful in court against a much larger corp?
Nestle has around 276,000 employees today, while Dualit seems to have around 100-200 (hard to tell since Dualit is private).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, he got sued by the patent holding company for using those seeds and then spraying them with Roundup , which would have killed off his crop had they not been the patented seeds. This is true of all the cases of people being sued for cultivating "Roundup-Ready" crops: the story they want to tell is that they were sued for cultivating seeds that accidentally wound up on their fields, but the facts established at tri…
> the story they want to tell is that they were sued for cultivating seeds that accidentally wound up on their fields, but the facts established at trial were that, however the seeds ended up there, the farmers deliberately exploited the patented system. I don't understand the distinction you're making. "cultivating seeds" and "deliberately exploiting the patented system" mean the same thing in this case. Spraying th…
Most people support patents because they have this romanticized notion of some little guy in his garage inventing the next light bulb. That’s not representative of the mass offensive and defensive patterns of use by modern corporations. We should just end patents, period.
I often think that the bigger a company or wealthier a person is they should get less things like tax deductions, patent protection, subsidies and a lot of others.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>The general public does not understand agriculture well, and I've noticed that this misunderstanding is stronger among those that have huge huge concerns about seeds and GMOs. This is Monsanto's most frequent talking point. They're very emphatic that GMO foods designed to survive being doused in massive amounts of roundup are completely safe (true) before they are sprayed with massive amounts of the (carcinogenic*)…
> (carcinogenic) roundup Citation needed. Roundup has been studied a lot. Very few of those studies find it is carcinogenic - enough that meta analysis finds it is not.
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The original statement was as followed: "I should be able to do whatever the fuck I want on my field as long as I don't use pesticides or processing that has been banned by law" And then someone responded to this by saying that someone signed a contract. And then you responded by going off about something that is refuted by the original statement. So, you need to agree that the original response about a contract was…
Yes, the original statement was overly narrow in its view of patents and contracts. Not only should you not enter into contracts that restrict how you can treat your fields, you should also not deliberately act in a way designed to infringe the rights of others if you want to be free to do as you please within the law without incurring liability. For example, you should not deliberately cultivate a patented plant for…
"Open source seeds", or as we used to call them, "seeds".
Open source seeds as in the Open Source Seed Initiate [1] come with a GPL-like pledge that you won't restrict creations from seeds based on these seeds [2] > You have the freedom to use these OSSI-Pledged seeds in any way you choose. In return, you pledge not to restrict others’ use of these seeds or their derivatives by patents or other means, and to include this pledge with any transfer of these seeds or their deri…
Most people support patents because they have this romanticized notion of some little guy in his garage inventing the next light bulb. That’s not representative of the mass offensive and defensive patterns of use by modern corporations. We should just end patents, period.
That said, our current patent system is problematic for sure. The bar for getting a patent has become far too low as systems have become too complex for independent patent examiners to really understand them, which has allowed many companies to amass a huge portfolio of techniques that are obvious to people in the field even if they appear novel to an external observer.
At least patents expire in a reasonable amount of time. Copyright is in a far worse place.