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1. Embed this notice
   LisPi (lispi314@udongein.xyz)'s status on Wednesday, 14-Aug-2024 15:43:17 JST LisPi
   > https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/P-4/page-7.html#h-412836
   
   How is this not blatantly evil on its face?
   
   Monopoly on ideas is morally indefensible.
   • Embed this notice
     iced depresso (icedquinn@blob.cat)'s status on Wednesday, 14-Aug-2024 15:43:16 JST iced depresso

     in reply to
     @lispi314 depending on who you ask, it was to coax people in to publishing. prior to patents you had a lot of trade secrets where people would hide everything. mathematicians for example kept a reserve stock of proofs to win competitions (they considered some of the theorems and proofs as personal trade secrets.)
     
     this gambit still exists. if you patent ex. a silicon chip process you have to tell everyone how you did it. then there's just an international knife agreement that nobody is allowed to cheat and use it until the timer is up. if you tell nobody, then its a trade secret which is only protected from corporate espionage but if someone else independently discovers it (or just does a good job at stealing it) you have no recourse.
     
     from an idealism perspective its supposed to let inventors talk about things with investors without investors being able to dupe it and cut the inventor out (this does not work at all in practice)
     
     from a machiavelian perspective it migrates finance from textiles and crop monopolies to include other technologies. a study done on the crystal palace exposition showed no-patent nations tended to fund scientific instruments where patent countries had a much more active gadget economy (most of the gadgets being mass market garbage, but sturgeons revelation--90% of any given field is crap anyway)
     
     from a practical perspective getting rid of it entirely puts you back at that trade secret corporate espionage dystopia again, but the duration is too long considering technology is increasing in pace. (copyrights/patents being 20 years was from a time that progress was quite slow.)
   • Embed this notice
     iced depresso (icedquinn@blob.cat)'s status on Thursday, 15-Aug-2024 04:19:29 JST iced depresso

     in reply to

     • trystimuli
     @tryst @lispi314 the courts have ruled you can patent maths as long as it's too complicated for the judge to understand. it was a very stupid precedent attached to the software patents issue.
     
     I remember this because Microsoft made some Bayesian skill ranking algorithm (TrueSkill) and it was patented.
   • Embed this notice
     trystimuli (tryst@fedi.imu.li)'s status on Thursday, 15-Aug-2024 04:19:37 JST trystimuli

     in reply to

     • iced depresso

     @icedquinn @lispi314

     from a practical perspective getting rid of it entirely puts you back at that trade secret corporate espionage dystopia again,

     i disagree on that point, but more generally on the framing.

     the whole stated purpose of patents is to encourage invention and technological innovation. the claim is that they do this by promoting sharing via monopoly grants instead of secretiveness. whether getting rid of patents creates a trade secret corporate espionage dystopia is the wrong question - the question should be does removing patents increase invention and innovation?

     prior to patents you had a lot of trade secrets where people would hide everything. mathematicians for example kept a reserve stock of proofs to win competitions

     firstly, patents have never covered mathematical proofs and so any secretiveness amongst mathematicians is irrelevant :) more importantly, prior to patents (in the modern sense) you had royally decreed monopolies with indefinite term and ill-defined scope. much like modern day patents the incentive was to keep the invention secret until a patent could be secured - and no incentive to innovate because the monopolies were granted by product rather than process.

     however, there have been various industries and times that were not subject to such state-given monopolies. the record there shows significant innovation that drops off when patents are extended to cover the industry. that drop off is probably a combination of patents slowing innovation (by diverting resources from research into litigation) and by the field maturing and the low-hanging fruit being explored.

     see Against Intellectual Monopoly, in particular Chapter 8 about whether monopolies increase innovation and Chapter 9 on the pharmaceutical industry.

   • Embed this notice
     iced depresso (icedquinn@blob.cat)'s status on Thursday, 15-Aug-2024 05:03:05 JST iced depresso

     in reply to

     • trystimuli
     @lispi314 @tryst i agree that the implementation largely fails to accomplish what the pundits say it does.
     
     i just had to raise that because of the whole "that's irrelevant quinn" is just dead wrong.
   • Embed this notice
     LisPi (lispi314@udongein.xyz)'s status on Thursday, 15-Aug-2024 05:03:06 JST LisPi

     in reply to

     • iced depresso
     • trystimuli
     @icedquinn @tryst There are a lot of patents that should be invalidated for similar reasons.
     
     And then there are all the cases of Microsoft literally patenting someone's public prior work. The Patent Offices don't care to even pretend to do verification with any real degree of diligence.