3 ms·

As it no longer promotes progress of science, I have no respect for patents anymore.

• kabdib 7y ago
  I've seen lawyers look up from reading a particularly convoluted and confusing passage and say, without a trace of irony, "This part of the claims is teaching that . . ." Teaching, yeah right. "Teaching" is what the patents are supposed to do. In reality, there is nearly always nothing to actually learn other than how much of, say, the act of 'breathing' the claimant is trying to do a land-grab on.
  • philipkglass 7y ago
    I have read many American chemistry patents. Up through the 1970s or thereabouts, they often did seem to teach things in enough detail for implementation by "a person having ordinary skill in the art." Now they usually make vague, broad claims and provide fewer, less clear examples of the invention's embodiment. I don't know what drove this drift toward uselessness. To explain this trend I might vaguely gesture toward businesses responding to stresses as the postwar golden economic era ended, except 1) old patents from before the postwar boom (e.g. 1930s) were also useful and to-the-point and 2) academic publications also grew more bullshitty in the same approximate time frame.
• lukifer 7y ago
  This was the podcast that took me from opposing software patents, to opposing the very concept of patents altogether: http://5by5.tv/hypercritical/67 http://5by5.tv/hypercritical/67 See also: "The idea that I can be presented with a problem, set out to logically solve it with the tools at hand, and wind up with a program that could not be legally used because someone else followed the same logical steps some years ago and filed for a patent on it is horrifying." - John Carmack
  • pnw_hazor 7y ago
    JC would just have to find a different/better way to solve the problem. Just like someone designing disc brakes or mouse traps.