4 ms·

Patents shouldn't exist at all.

• VWWHFSfQ 4y ago
  That's going way too far.
• TimTheTinker 4y ago
  Patents have served society significantly. Without them, companies would develop new technology and keep it secret, forcing others to guess or reverse-engineer the process -- at which point they would likely keep it secret as well. So many governments give people a limited (usually <20 year) guaranteed monopoly on an idea in exchange for a full, public description of what the new idea is. If you look through the US patent archives, there are instructions for all sorts of manufacturing and construction technologies that would have never become public knowledge had patents not existed. The problem comes when a company successfully patents an idea that's already publicly known, or an idea that is strictly mathematical or abstract enough to be used against others but not concrete enough to be turned into a successful product.
  • Gigachad 4y ago
    They still keep it secret though. The patent system didn't allow us to work out how all the proprietary microcontrollers and SoCs work so we have projects like the one trying to reverse engineer the M1. And the publish this reverse engineering for free without the help of the patent system. Half of the patents are on absolutely trivial stuff that reverse engineering means looking at it for 1 minute.
    • TimTheTinker 4y ago
      Early US patents weren't like this. The major problems we're dealing with today didn't appear until later.
    • VWWHFSfQ 4y ago
      This is basically the entire raison d'être for GPLv3. It doesn't matter much if the source code is available, or if the specification is available, if you can't actually write code to use it.
  • klabb3 4y ago
    > Without [patents], companies would develop new technology and keep it secret, forcing others to guess or reverse-engineer the process That would be awful! Thank god we avoided this dystopian nightmare.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]