Amazon owes $525M in cloud-storage patent fight, US jury says

That's why protocols like TCP are designed by huge collaborations of engineering teams across companies, while an individual who knows the protocol spec can implement TCP in a couple of days.

Sure, books are great at popularizing ideas, serve as a unit of discourse, like papers, journals, conferences and whatnot.

But when Dickens wanted to make money he wrote A Christmas Carol not A Teatrise On Socioeconomic Inequalities for Saturnalia. (And most likely he had a bigger impact this way.)

> To be fair though I don't really understand why do people care that much about being able to use Mickey Mouse in their content.

I think people somewhat rightfully feel that the social contract has been unfairly altered. The deal was that Mickey gets a temporary monopoly, and we respect it so we then get it for "free".

In a hypothetical bleak grey philosophical vacuum the first time someone draws a mouse what would be the fair thing? Respecting authorship (so no plagiarism), giving credit, sure, that's the minimum, but can others copy it, add some colors and pizzazz and become the new creative king/queen of the hill? (One one hand, maybe it would give society the best stuff, the most amazing variations of all the themes. On the other hand maybe artists would burn out in 2 seconds and nobody would ever even dare to try to come up with anything original, because the game is to derive better derivatives.)

... but I don't think so. If it would be that easy to turn anything up to 11 in a second, then we would see it all the time. (Instead what we see is conservative reboots/remakes/remixes that fit the current mainstream. With its pros and cons! It's important to note, that it's despite all the brutal forever plus zillion years copyright regime we do get these summer hits that are basically old song with a new spin. And it's fine. And sometimes we get Dune part I, II, and soon III, and hopefully more parts too! Bless the maker and his water!)

And as I (hopefully) implied before, it's good that we worked out a social contract that incentivizes these things (that we think are the cornerstones of the progress we want/need), but it seems there's quite a lot more work to be done on this, because it was very crude before, and now it's just ridiculously blunt.

And it's a hard problem, I don't want to say that most people today only really get the downsides (higher medicine prices), because the whole drug discovery and push to market pipeline is horribly inefficient, eats money like there's no tomorrow, and it's not just patents. The FDA can grant ~3 years of exclusivity with the marketing authorization, right?

But. We see that patents are already not good enough for medicine. (Or that the busy little lobby beavers built a huge fucking dam around the patent moat. Just to be sure.)

My account is three and a half years old, has more karma than your account, and has an equal amount of personal information (zero). Calling it a "throwaway" is inaccurate, saying that I'm "hiding" is manipulative, and your further statement

> but sure, I'll bite

...is further evidence of emotional manipulation instead of reason and intellect.

> The very few attempts that we had in modern times were ultimately sabotaged by capitalism

Given the many non-free-market states (almost all of which were communist, but the point generalizes), every single one of which has failed, the overwhelmingly most likely cause is simply that they don't work. Any claims otherwise require a massive amount of evidence.

> Capitalism did sprout innovation, but that does not mean it's the best way to do so. Ignoring the inherent flaws around the profit motive doesn't help anyone.

Nobody, including in this thread, is "ignoring" anything. Sane people look at the free market system, realize that it needs some amount of regulation to remain stable, and apply that. Insane people suggest that communism is a plausible alternative to free markets - and nobody has been able to come up with another system other than those two.

> I don't think so, honestly.

You're incorrect, then. The point that you made was "[Capitalism] actually pushes innovation towards profits, not pure innovation" - and nobody claimed that capitalism incentivizes "pure innovation", so that's the very definition of a strawman argument.

> The reality is that a lot of research is done with the question of "how can we make money solving this problem?", rather than "how can we solve this problem?"

Again, nobody claimed otherwise - if you had read the comment you're responding to, you would have also seen:

>> the "side effect" of innovation happening as a result of chasing profits is literally how "capitalism" is designed to work

> Regulators that are corrupted in search of capital. It's a circular system.

This is both incorrect and irrelevant. Incorrect, because regulators are corrupted in search of money and power, not because of capital. Irrelevant, because those factors are present in every other alternate system. Free market systems are not unique in this matter, and so this is an irrelevant point to bring up because no alternative system will change this.

> Many do believe that democratically elect people should have more power than private institutions with zero transparency or checks. Not sure exactly how that "decreases the quality of human life". Where did that come from?

Again - you should read comments before you respond to them:

>> corrupt regulators that anti-capitalists would happily put into greater positions of power and give more power to meaningfully decrease the quality of human life

Putting corrupt regulators into greater positions of power is what "decreases the quality of human life".

Free market systems are not feasible, and capitalism (a system defined around description of a real, at the time existing, system) is not a “free market” system (an infeasible abstraction invented as a post-hoc rationalization for capitalism.)