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When the patents of the piston engine ended, the combustion engine saw tremendous innovation. So as long as the monopoly is in place, only the military will get
by unlmtd 10y ago
When the patents of the piston engine ended, the combustion engine saw tremendous innovation. So as long as the monopoly is in place, only the military will get hand held computers, and everyone else will get toys. IP is fraud.
- Clubber 10y ago>IP is fraud. I wouldn't go that far. IP is a carrot for development. Imagine if you spend a decade and $100K developing an idea, and just when it started taking off, Oracle or somebody copied it and took the entire market. That can and does still happen, but at least you have legal recourse with IP laws. It was originally a way to foster innovation for a maximum of 28 years, then the works would enter the public domain to be improved upon. Over the years, the copyright duration has become ridiculously long, negating the social benefits of it's existence. The fundamental concept is sound, it's when it's perverted to help the wolves rather than the sheep that it stinks.
- Zigurd 10y agoEven the phrase "intellectual property" is highly tendentious. It implies property right where there are none. What you get from the patent office is a temporary government granted monopoly. Often, as with, for example, spectrum, the people holding the license tend to view the object, and not the government granted license, as their perpetual property.
- sbov 10y agoDepends upon how you look at it. I find the idea of property rights a bit funny because every physical thing you can own exists because in the past someone murdered the fuck out of people to own what it's made from. In that regard, intellectual property is the only property not built on human suffering.
- petra 10y agoOn the other hand, lack of some protection against competition, or a reasonable business model, often stop the the serious investment needed to take many products to market. Maybe an interesting useful compromise, would be to build a patent pool(maybe between universities), where you must contribute any patent you develop, but you can use patents freely for research and small scale commercialization - but in any case of large scale commercialization, you agree to share some reasonable percent of royalties among the relevant patents of that pool , with the amount that goes towards each patent doesn't interefere with your business, and gets settled in a fair, sideway process ?
- dredmorbius 10y agoCitation requested. The ICE originated ... about 1880. Innovation in ICEs and automobiles peaked around the 1920s (Robert J. Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, 2016), and for aviation, jet propulsion excepted, about a decade later. Even jet aviation's progressed comparatively little since the 1960s, with most advances being in materials and control systems. Actual travel experience has declined as a function of total speed (though safety has improved). I'm not discounting the possiblity that the ICE saw patent-induced retardation in development (the case is strongly made for steam power and Watt's extended patents, expiring in 1800). But I'd really like to see a source.