4 ms·

That has always been a bullshit justification. Inventions are not one off events, almost everything gets rediscovered many times, it's patents that make them so

• bbor 3y ago
  Ooo you just unlocked the whole thing for me. According the basic tenets of modern Standpoint theory (and really post-enlightenment empiricism more generally), any technical idea or expression only has meaning in the author’s particular linguistic/professional/intellectual context — in their “standpoint”. So our attempt to apply capitalist property notions to ideas fails from the jump, because our whole culture treats ideas as fallible individual beliefs, not eternal divine forms. Silly capitalist IP lawyers from the past few hundred years, their whole epistemic framework is inconsistent. Somebody should tell them, I’m sure they’d about face…
• TimTheTinker 3y ago
  I don't think it was BS in the early days of the US, in medieval & renaissance Europe, and in antiquity. Life was harder, populations were orders of magnitude smaller, and a much smaller proportion of people had the means and education to invent things. The middle class was non-existent, and the most modern technology of the time was only available to an elite few. So the legal fiction that inventions could only happen "once" was not so terribly inaccurate; it was even useful. But I agree that given how many people have access to the means of invention today, patent systems have become an absurd notion, and they only create absurd results in the marketplace. The time for patent systems came and is now long gone. Thanks for changing my mind.