this post was submitted on 17 Nov 2024
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Patents shouldn't exist! Mostly.
We had a history before patents/copyright were enforced. It was pretty brutal for anyone trying to make a living with their creations. Take a look and see if you want to return to that.
yeah now its brutal for anyone trying to make a living and excellent for anyone who already inherited a living and has more money than they could use in multiple lifetimes. I'd hate to go back to when it was just brutal for anyone trying to make a living.
I think the problem would be similar. The rich and powerful would be the only ones to profit off of inventions and innovations.
We still have indie game devs today. Imagine if any company could just copy an indie game and scale it up/polish a bit and get all the sales.
You're describing the entire mobile games industry. You think all those top apps in the app stores are 100% original? No. They copied other games.
Also, patents have nothing to do with that. Software is covered by copyright.
Furthermore, "back in the day" manufacturing was expensive and required huge factories to build stuff (in quantity). The barrier to entry was enormous! People were mostly uneducated and there was not much in the way of "shared engineering knowledge". Ten thousand people could look at a car engine and have no friggin clue how it worked. That's why patents were necessary: Disclosure
These days disclosure has become irrelevant. Any engineer can look at an invention or product and figure out both how it works and how it was made. At the very least, they can figure out a way to make it. Just look at all the Youtube channels where every day people are making complicated machines, parts, and electronics! The mysteries are gone. Disclosure is unnecessary.
Since the entire point of patents was disclosure why do we still need them?
What patent or copyright is preventing you from making a living?
A shitty solution for a shitty situation is not a good solution
Feel free to share your revolutionary idea that will still incentivize people to create without creating a "shitty situation".
Software existed for decades without (software) patents and has innovated and evolved vastly more quickly than any other science. Then we created software patents and things actually started to slow down (because lawsuits take time and threaten to end great software before it even exists).
Software is already covered by copyright which is all that was necessary for some of the richest companies in the world to come into existence (e.g. Microsoft, Oracle). Software patents shouldn't exist!
I don't need to come up with any revolutionary ideas, the open source folks are already creating without patenting their creations
Here's a revolutionary idea: universal basic income. No need to prevent other people from monetizing your idea if you don't need to monetize your idea in the first place
The largest contributors to Open Source make their money from patents and other IP. As in, they can afford to give away lots of time and effort because they make their money with IP. If IP were to be eradicated as you're proposing, all those contributions to Open Source by those largest contributors would evaporate. Here's the largest Open Source contributors from 2017-2020.
source
The data in that video is (probably) accurate but your statement is completely wrong: In that list only Intel makes anything but trivial amounts of money from patents. In fact, Microsoft, Google, and Docker have famously lost shittons of money thanks to patents. They basically siphoned money out of those companies into the pockets of lawyers and provided absolutely no benefit to society.
For fuck's sake: Features were removed from Android because of software patents!
Not only that but Google makes almost all of its money from advertising, not "IP". Same for Meta which is oddly missing from the graph (even though they contribute to and maintain a ton of FOSS stuff).
Then let's talk about #1: Redhat. They absolutely would be 1000% behind banning software patents. It's nothing but trouble for them.
I'd also like to note that Microsoft has been very much in favor of software patents since they were invented by the courts (remember: no legislation added software as a category of patentable subject matter: They exist as a result of court rulings!) because they thought they would put an end to open source software (see: Halloween documents). However, software patents have actually cost Microsoft more than they ever helped the company! In short: They're idiots. They opened a can of worms that's kept them constantly under attack but because those worms also hurt their perceived enemies they've doubled down on their decision.
✨ anarchism✨ sorry, you said revolutionary 😎 /hj
I agree that it's the best thing in capitalist society. I feel like if you think patents should exist, software patents should also exist, though.
Why? Software patents are already covered by copyright. Anyone can write software and they automatically get assigned the copyright for it. The barrier to entry is basically zero since everyone has a computer and nearly anyone can learn to program by simply taking the time to do so.
I mean, I also don't think patents should exist in general but there's a pretty clear difference between software and things in the physical world. Software is "just math". And I mean that literally: 100% of all software that exists can be reduced to math that you could--in theory--perform with a pencil and paper.
There's a lot of reasons why software patents shouldn't exist far beyond the scope of patents in general.
Copyright only prevents you from copying code, not copying the design. Patents are meant to protect design. I also agree that software patents shouldn't go beyond normal patents or protect overgeneralized stuff with prior art.
Patents are not the problem, they serve as a way to share the knowledge of a creation with everyone while protecting your company for a REASONABLE TIME to compensate for the RnD costs.
The problem is the distortion of the concept to fit late stage capitalism delights.