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Who cares? Intellectual property frankly makes no sense if you don’t worship money.
by nynx 5y ago
Who cares? Intellectual property frankly makes no sense if you don’t worship money.
- causality0 5y agoIt makes sense if you have one scheme that creates that is choked out by a different scheme that copies instead. Eventually there is no creation.
- tovej 5y agoPatents also choke creativity, and arguably in a worse way. If you can't remix existing ideas, how are you supposed to create anything useful if you need to come up with an alternative scheme to every component problem that has already been solved but is already patented.
- FpUser 5y agoYeah, it had taken me 10 years of heavy R&D investments to come up with this ingenious idea that the phone can have rounded corners. /s Sorry but the situation now it that one can not even fart without breaking some patent. It is ridiculous, serves only big corps and keeps smaller companies under constant threat of litigations they can not afford. And most of the patents are plain obvious. I was once asked to come up with the idea of how to implement some XXX feature. It had taken me about 10 minutes to "invent" the main approach and then couple of days to spec it down to such form that it could be given to subcontractor. Upon checking however we've easily found at least 10 patents covering this exact XXX. And this is everywhere. From a tool to compensate the inventors the patents system has become a tool to serve fat cats.
- JaimeThompson 5y agoShould all software be licensed as public domain or the closes available to PD in countries that don't allow public domain software?
- nynx 5y agoSoftware is a lot less important than patents. Patents should not be allowed or should expire in a year.
- JaimeThompson 5y agoLicenses are intellectual property too so I am a bit confused why the difference? Was the first statement just over broad? Not trying to be argumentative, just trying to understand your position when I am a bit tired.
- nynx 5y agoYeah, too broad. Licenses and copyright are a net negative in my view, but patents are far worse.
- pfisherman 5y ago> Intellectual property frankly makes no sense if you don’t worship money. Patents incentivize inventors to publicly disclose how their inventions work. They publicly disclose how their invention works and in exchange are given exclusive rights to it for a limited period of time. This is predicated on the idea that in the absence of such a system, inventors have strong incentives to not disclose how their inventions work, which ultimately slows the spread of knowledge and puts a damper on innovation. What parts of this do not make sense? How else would you solve the problem of incentives around disclosing how technologies work?
- nynx 5y agoI agree that was the original intention, but these days (and possibly the entire time) it just slows innovation by preventing people from using technologies.
- pfisherman 5y agoYes, patents do hamper innovation. But this does not acknowledge or address the counterfactual of whether not having a patent system would hamper innovation to a greater extent. Without this the argument rests on an unstated assumption / magical thinking, which is not borne out by historical data. It’s like saying that traffic lights impede the flow of traffic (true), without acknowledging the fact that not having traffic lights would result in much greater congestion (also true).
- randomhodler84 5y agoOpen source licensing incentivizes inventors to release their creations to the world to benefit humanity. Their copyright is protected and depending on the license that picked can control redistribution. Their work is protected against people passing their work off as their own, which is the intention of the patent idea. Patents do nothing like this, in fact, they cause inventors to invent around “protected ideas”. Technology history is littered with examples of inefficient implementations become standard to avoid patent infringement. We end up with negative-incentives with patented ideas. In technology, a patent is a sure way to ensure that an idea is never implemented. Nothing about patents, or the idea that an idea is exclusive and protection worth is worth salvaging. Patents do not achieve their stated goal. Closed source software is inherently untrustworthy. The incentive to disclose ideas protected against plagiarism can be achieved through both public trust in our free and open source ecosystem without the need to enforce state violence because some dude dreamed an idea once and wrote a paper.
- deltaonefour 5y agoWho doesn't worship money? Let's not kid ourselves. We all worship money to a degree where we understand how the concept of intellectual property incentivizes the creation of "intellectual property."