111–120 of 222 posts
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This comment implies that most of the massive technological innovation since 1400s came around because of patents. That's far from the truth. Patent systems that old were local and very different from the modern variant. Besides, most regions didn't have patent systems at all. The Netherlands didn't really get patent law until early 20th century. That didn't stop them from innovating and inventing. Germany similarly.
I did not read any such implication.
The concept of intellectual property is antithetical to how humans have progressed socially and technologically for millenia. It's a wasteful aberration that strangles innovation with red tape and hands control of our culture over to those with the financial mean to claim to own it. The day we wrest back that control will be a good day.
IP doesn't feel great but it feels a lot better than having every bit of research be a trade secret.
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The first patents were not about innovation at all but essentially government guaranteed monopolies similar to guilds. > 1. Patents usually involve a lot of research — and existed as a way to ensure that competition couldn't imitate your product without also making that investment, licensing it from you, etc. If there was no protection, they would immediately undercut you since they don't have investment costs to cov…
> Patents almost never describe processes and technology with sufficient detail to reproduce them (in fact many companies will purposefully not patent those things they consider central to their business, to keep them secret) and are instead written so broad as to just create a moat to prevent any newcomers from entering. That's pretty false. The requirement for a patent in the US is that it is detailed enough that a…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The first patents were not about innovation at all but essentially government guaranteed monopolies similar to guilds. > 1. Patents usually involve a lot of research — and existed as a way to ensure that competition couldn't imitate your product without also making that investment, licensing it from you, etc. If there was no protection, they would immediately undercut you since they don't have investment costs to cov…
> Patents almost never describe processes and technology with sufficient detail to reproduce them (in fact many companies will purposefully not patent those things they consider central to their business, to keep them secret) and are instead written so broad as to just create a moat to prevent any newcomers from entering. That's pretty false. The requirement for a patent in the US is that it is detailed enough that a…
I can assure you that in practice they are neither.
There are merely a lot of people in the legal profession whose jobs depend on ignoring that fact.
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Assassins are a step too far, but maybe advertising…let the public choose whether to buy the real deal instead of the parasitical imitators.
The public will buy the cheapest, almost-as-good option 99% of the time. If morality were a strong deciding factor, we wouldn't have megacorporations like Nestlé and Unilever making everything, nor would all of our clothes be made by sweatshops. I'm not going to spend billions of dollars on some new gadget when every other company will have the exact same thing for sale next month with razor-thin margins. There's no…
Paradoxically it's one of the most common arguments people use in favor of the system: it pushes innovation!
It actually pushes innovation towards profits, not pure innovation. When real innovation happens it's mostly by coincidence on the small intersection of the Venn diagram.
Edit: It's interesting that the patent system was created, in theory, to allow people to profit from innovation and actually promote it. Ironically it instead created a whole industry of extracting rent from broad useless patents that stifles innovation even further.
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unfortunately, drug designing is special condition here. the experiment of drugs spend cray amounts of money.
You wouldn't put aside, say, 3% of your taxes to fund research into medicine? Especially if that research focused not on "what's the most profitable medicine" but rather "what medicine would increase well being the most"? You really can't imagine that decoupling the profit motive from drug research is possible?
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unfortunately, drug designing is special condition here. the experiment of drugs spend cray amounts of money.
You wouldn't put aside, say, 3% of your taxes to fund research into medicine? Especially if that research focused not on "what's the most profitable medicine" but rather "what medicine would increase well being the most"? You really can't imagine that decoupling the profit motive from drug research is possible?
Not if it goes through the traditional grant process. I've fundamentally soured on that.
Maybe an open bounty system? First one to develop an effective drug for X gets their costs paid for + 1 billion or something (number pulled straight out of my ass, feel free to adjust)
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You can use the "dropping a hash" method (patio11 has used this). As you progress your work, you publish a hash of it using a service trusted by everyone to correctly identify the researchers and timestamp their hashes. If someone publishes the paper, you can then publish the files that resulted with the dropped hash and therefore prove you had certain progress of the work at a certain time.
Yes you can provably document your progress, but it doesn't solve the problem that someone else may have published overlapping ideas earlier and you can't prove that you didn't read what they published.
Basically, if you could show that you had already made significant progress before the publication date, then you might be granted the patent as well.
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> Patents almost never describe processes and technology with sufficient detail to reproduce them (in fact many companies will purposefully not patent those things they consider central to their business, to keep them secret) and are instead written so broad as to just create a moat to prevent any newcomers from entering. That's pretty false. The requirement for a patent in the US is that it is detailed enough that a…
Patents are in principle supposed to be non-obvious, and detailed enough that an expert in the domain can reproduce the invention from the description. I can assure you that in practice they are neither. There are merely a lot of people in the legal profession whose jobs depend on ignoring that fact.
The concept of intellectual property is antithetical to how humans have progressed socially and technologically for millenia. It's a wasteful aberration that strangles innovation with red tape and hands control of our culture over to those with the financial mean to claim to own it. The day we wrest back that control will be a good day.
The first patent was issued in the 1400's — it is exactly how humans have progressed technologically and sociality. Let's stop being so absolutist about these topics. The problem here isn't that patents exist, intellectual property protection is critical to investment and research. The issue here is two fold: 1. Patents usually involve a lot of research — and existed as a way to ensure that competition couldn't imita…
Compare that to something like AWS and the equation is basically flipped. Figuring out what to do is not that difficult compared to actually doing it, Amazon could probably open source all of their cloud offerings tomorrow and outside a handful of very capable actors, implementing another AWS would be next to impossible.
Lots of things in tech are flipped on their head like that, you can describe the idea and functions of Uber at a high level on a back of a napkin, but good luck actually implementing and doing so successfully.
That's why personally I think patents should be abolished in the tech space, they just don't help anyone except the owners of the patent but they don't help in the way people actually intended it to. Here it's not like Cove lost out on being a huge cloud player because Amazon stole the idea behind S3 and DynamoDB, they just "own" the idea and are trying to extract money from Amazon.