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>Of course, anybody who has actually built anything knows that what he actually did was "decide how something should work". You do this dozens of times when put
by batista 14y ago
>Of course, anybody who has actually built anything knows that what he actually did was "decide how something should work". You do this dozens of times when putting out a new product, and it's not in any way a big deal.
Sounds like a very useful feature to me, and something that competitors or previous products did not had.
And "deciding how something should work" sounds like a perfectly good description of an _invention_.
- cma 14y agoAnyone that has implemented something like that knows implementation and execution is the really hard part.
- batista 14y agoImplementation has the chance of being the "hard part" only _after_ the idea has been thought.
- fpgeek 14y agoWhat are you smoking? If the implementation is too hard, the idea was worthless.
- css771 14y agoTrue but there are multiple ways of doing something. So after thinking about an idea, finding the easiest way to implement it is also a task in itself.
- batista 14y agoI'm not smoking anything, thank you very much for your polite inquiry. How you came to the conclusion that "If the implementation is too hard, the idea was worthless", I can't even begin to think. Difficulty of implementation and worthiness of idea are totally orthogonal. There are tons of very important ideas that had a very difficult implementation. E.g the idea behind the atomic bomb was very valuable despite the fact that the implementation took some of the top minds, several years and millions of dollars.
- natrius 14y agoIs "the progress of science and useful arts" promoted by granting monopolies over such things? That is, would Apple have chosen not to create the iPhone without patents like this? I think not.
- batista 14y ago>That is, would Apple have chosen not to create the iPhone without patents like this? I think not. If you take only one patent as an example, maybe not. But if Apple couldn't secure ANY patent on the iPhone, and any competitor was free to copy it as he liked, well, not only the might have not produced it, but the very industry might not even exist and have the scope it has today.
- natrius 14y agoAren't the iPhone and the Samsung Galaxy S3 functionally equivalent? For the sake of argument, haven't competitors succeeded in "copying" the iPhone to their hearts' content? Note that trade dress is a class of IP on its own that definitely has helped Apple, since competitors can't create products and try to pass them off as the iPhone itself. The iPhone is a very successful product, and it owes very little of that success to patents.
- abecedarius 14y agoThere were few-to-no software patents until the 80s. In that period there was rapid progress, and many new industries; some say much faster progress than since. It's true that when some areas offer artificial monopolies and others don't, investors like the former. But extending the domain of monopolies isn't the only way to debias that.
- blrgeek 14y agoWhat are you talking about? Apple makes the Mac Pro, the iMac, Macbook Pro, Macbook Air, which are all generic computers, which anyone can (and does) copy. Do you think they would not do it since they can't patent a laptop computer, that's rectangular? Or an all-in-one computer? Or a tower computer?