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How's this different than ARM? That something is cheap to manufacturer says a ton more about the huge advancements in semiconductors than it says about any val
by latch 6y ago
How's this different than ARM?
That something is cheap to manufacturer says a ton more about the huge advancements in semiconductors than it says about any value of what that chip does.
It's fine to dislike patents, but I don't think this reasoning is sound.
- xoa 6y ago>How's this different than ARM? What!? ARM doesn't do any standards essential stuff, they just developed their own ISA. And they have a massive array of options, from their own ready to go cores all the way up to perpetual architecture licenses that someone can do whatever they want with (so long as it's conformant) indefinitely. How is that remotely similar to something like codec or wireless standards? ARM is about as polar opposite from "refuse to license to for chips, try to extract based on patents for the whole device" as it gets. Their entire business is based around licensing to chip makers with nothing to do with the rest of the device. And if they ever tried such a thing, well first of all it wouldn't affect their perpetual licensees at all, and second everyone would just move to RISC-V or whatever. Software patents are all wrong and should be eliminated anyway, IP value there and development incensitves are covered more than sufficiently by copyright. But it's much worse in what are literally monopoly collusion cases in the good sense, aka "standards". Normally even having a patent doesn't give an entity any special privileges against anti-trust there, they have a monopoly on their own patent but they can't seek to force everyone to use it illegally. Standards though are of great value, and while being horizontal monopolies can be very important in preventing vertical monopolies. Plus they're key when dealing with hard and soft natural monopolies, such as utilization of EM spectrum or content formats. But the counter to that is supposed to be that while everyone in the pool gets a fair cut, they also give up their rights of discrimination or exclusivity. Anyone who doesn't do that for a SEP should have the book brought down on them hard.
- sqrt17 6y agoThere's a difference between selling flowers in a shop and randomly going around and pointing your gun at people holding flowers and asking them to pay up. The alternative to buying flowers is just spending your money on other things, which is different to the alternatives you have in an armed robbery. Patent law gives patent owners a monopoly (i.e. the gun) over how an invention is used, but just like there's a difference between self-defense with a gun and using it for armed robbery, there should be - and increasingly is - regulation that forces patent owners to act as market participants offering something valuable rather than street thugs going for protection money. It's fine to dislike patents, just as it's fine to dislike anti-competitive or outright dishonest practices around patents. Either alone or both in combination are reasonable standpoints.