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Maybe for software, but I bet there are industrial processes which would be significantly harder. In any case, even if inventions would not be lost, there stil

Maybe for software, but I bet there are industrial processes which would be significantly harder. In any case, even if inventions would not be lost, there still needs to be some kind of protection to allow profiting from invention, for some period. Otherwise the competitive advantage in making progress would be severely diminished.

trhway 2y ago
Musk and SpaceX for example is a counter example to your argument. Anybody is free to repeat what the SpaceX is doing. And many is trying to repeat what the Tesla is doing. Seems Musk isn't enforcing any patents. And what a remarkable boom and progress we have in deep learning, LLM, etc - everybody copies and improves upon everybody's work - precisely because various key items like transformers are either not patented or the patents aren't enforced by their owners. >Otherwise the competitive advantage in making progress would be severely diminished. The making progress is the main competitive advantage today. >protection to allow profiting from invention that means blocking others which means slowing down public progress these days - why should we do that? The patents were to the public benefit in 19th century (and even then the patent value was already starting to be of the perverse kind - ie. Diesel invented his engine to circumvent Otto's patent. Unfortunately for us the 0.9 or 1.1 click of button seems to be physically impossible.) when trained engineers and scientists were rare and expensive, and thus their work had outsized value. Today we have crowds of them.
- MattPalmer1086 2y ago
  Sure, there are maybe some things which don't need protection. The existence of counter examples doesn't invalidate the general case. Clearly, building reliable rockets is hard and takes a long time to get to profitability. Tesla is losing market share rapidly. > The making progress is the main competitive advantage today. I'm not sure what point you are making here. The competitive advantage is largely happening in a system that uses patents. My point is if you take that away, it is by no means certain that progress would remain a competitive advantage. >that means blocking others which mean slowing down public progress Only if you discount the observation that without some protection, the progress may not happen at all.

trhway 2y ago

Musk and SpaceX for example is a counter example to your argument. Anybody is free to repeat what the SpaceX is doing. And many is trying to repeat what the Tesla is doing. Seems Musk isn't enforcing any patents. And what a remarkable boom and progress we have in deep learning, LLM, etc - everybody copies and improves upon everybody's work - precisely because various key items like transformers are either not patented or the patents aren't enforced by their owners. >Otherwise the competitive advantage in making progress would be severely diminished. The making progress is the main competitive advantage today. >protection to allow profiting from invention that means blocking others which means slowing down public progress these days - why should we do that? The patents were to the public benefit in 19th century (and even then the patent value was already starting to be of the perverse kind - ie. Diesel invented his engine to circumvent Otto's patent. Unfortunately for us the 0.9 or 1.1 click of button seems to be physically impossible.) when trained engineers and scientists were rare and expensive, and thus their work had outsized value. Today we have crowds of them.

MattPalmer1086 2y ago
Sure, there are maybe some things which don't need protection. The existence of counter examples doesn't invalidate the general case. Clearly, building reliable rockets is hard and takes a long time to get to profitability. Tesla is losing market share rapidly. > The making progress is the main competitive advantage today. I'm not sure what point you are making here. The competitive advantage is largely happening in a system that uses patents. My point is if you take that away, it is by no means certain that progress would remain a competitive advantage. >that means blocking others which mean slowing down public progress Only if you discount the observation that without some protection, the progress may not happen at all.