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The idea was basically "Let's give some legal protections to investment in research so someone can't just steal it the second you publish it". As it is common,

by adql 4y ago

The idea was basically "Let's give some legal protections to investment in research so someone can't just steal it the second you publish it". As it is common, the idea was fine, it even somewhat worked in few places, but applying it everywhere turned out to be silly. We have medical companies changing an atom here in there to make "same" but legally distinct drugs, and software people patenting half a day of work of someone as some "invention" (and my favourite [1], "playing with cat using a laser pointer"). It failed as a system decades ago and if anything it became blockage to innovation (gotta check thousands of patents, they might be too similar!). More than that, it is peanuts in cost for corporation but significant one for a single "inventor" so majority of it lies in hands of corporations that would do that R&D anyway. The protection it provides was also supposed to encourage publishing the science (as opposed to just lock up your trade secrets and never show it to the world) but frankly long patent interval makes it a bit pointless, competition can just invent "same/similar legally distinct process in many situation and only people getting richer by patents are lawyers, not "inventors". I start to think laws should have "best by" date, and be re-evaulated after 10 or 20 years whether they served a purpose well and still serve it... [1] Method of exercising a cat https://patents.google.com/patent/US5443036A/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US5443036A/en

asdff 4y ago
It's really that the capitalistic patent driven research system is pretty terrible imo. So you have some need to invent some technology for the betterment of humanity and the world. The patent model requires that in order for that technology to exist, someone needs to have the idea out of the blue, and for it to go on to be produced at all it needs to be a convincing enough idea for people to part with their disposable income out of their own will to fund all the overhead of this business plus profit. That seems like a great way to invent a cash cow that the government protects on your behalf, but I'm not sure we would have invented and proliferated the wheel or the bow and arrow if we had this model all through out our human history. You'd have people dealing with really crappy octagonal wheels because someone is squatting on the round wheel patent and might not even have much of an interest to bring it to mass market. There is another model for innovation, however, and that is the government research grant model. The government taxes wealth, the taxes accumulate into massive funds, government experts hired from the field identify compelling research topics that would benefit the collective, funds are made available and other researchers submit proposals of what they would do with that money, government experts choose the most promising proposals, money goes to things based on research merit versus the product or technologies potential to take money from people's pockets.

by adql 4y ago

asdff 4y ago

It's really that the capitalistic patent driven research system is pretty terrible imo. So you have some need to invent some technology for the betterment of humanity and the world. The patent model requires that in order for that technology to exist, someone needs to have the idea out of the blue, and for it to go on to be produced at all it needs to be a convincing enough idea for people to part with their disposable income out of their own will to fund all the overhead of this business plus profit. That seems like a great way to invent a cash cow that the government protects on your behalf, but I'm not sure we would have invented and proliferated the wheel or the bow and arrow if we had this model all through out our human history. You'd have people dealing with really crappy octagonal wheels because someone is squatting on the round wheel patent and might not even have much of an interest to bring it to mass market. There is another model for innovation, however, and that is the government research grant model. The government taxes wealth, the taxes accumulate into massive funds, government experts hired from the field identify compelling research topics that would benefit the collective, funds are made available and other researchers submit proposals of what they would do with that money, government experts choose the most promising proposals, money goes to things based on research merit versus the product or technologies potential to take money from people's pockets.