3 ms·

I think we should have less patents and more sharing. Most inventions derive some knowledge from previous inventors, thus we are standing on the shoulder of gia

• hga 13y ago
  In other domains, this is supposed to be one of the reasons patents are a good thing, companies disclose their knowledge in return for a 20 year monopoly after the date of filing. Otherwise they'd try to keep this info as a trade secret for an indefinite period of time. Some times it works well, some times it doesn't, e.g. steam engines are said to be a classic example of the latter, sinstering 3D printers might be another example of the latter. I believe it works well in the chemical realm, and to my knowledge it didn't harm the quick development of integrated circuits. Because there are so many "inventions" in any one piece of software, as a practical matter it doesn't seem like it's a good field to allow patents.
• protomyth 13y ago
  In most places, the players know not to be pains and patent licensing works fairly well (pool patents, spec, standard, small fee). Software has a problem[1] because many don't make money off the software and instead make money off other means. There is not a nicely understood product to pay with. Where we see it all go bad (e.g. medicine), it has a lot to do with the rules of the systems (e.g. clinical trials) or just plain stupidity (e.g. 3D printing). If h.264 licensing had just been from hardware accelerators and not software implementation / content, then no fuss would have been raised. I so hoped they would see the light with h.265. 1) well, other than the stupidity of patenting business processes as if they are some technical invention