🎓 Doc Freemo 🇳🇱 @freemo@qoto.org

@freeloader2020

One of the requirements for a patent is that the idea being patent can not be obviously or trivially derived from other patents or known ideas. This implies that in order to patent something, and have that patent hold up in court, you have either put significant work into the creation of the idea or be superiorly gifted and capable of significant intellectual output for your efforts. The other requirement is the patent must be "useful" in some way.

Now of course in practice whether this law is actually upheld is another matter, I do find some trivial patents are sometimes upheld through the shear might of a team of lawyers, and that is a problem that needs fixing.

But the point here is that if a person is going to invest significant effort or talent into creating something useful and new they should and do have the right to decide if they want to be compensated for their effort or not.

The original intent of patents were to empower the people, not necessarily companies. This should be apparent if you consider the situation in some detail. Without patents any novel ideas would need to be held secret and applied to some process in a way that enhances the process in order to make money off of it. There would be no way to make money off the idea directly.

Imagine an idea someone had whereby they could create soda cans that were capable of holding the same pressure but use half the metal content to do so. Without patents a person with such an idea would have no way to profit off of it. Their choices would be to either forget the idea, or to offer it to the public whereby soda manufacturers would be able to steal and exploit his idea to make profit without giving anything to the individual. Similarly without his idea being patented he could not approach a soda-manufacturer in private to sell the idea because by simply describing the idea the company could steal the idea and not need to pay the person a penny.

The inventor has no way to profit as an individual and by eliminating patents only large companies benefit since they have the means to keep their own ideas private and profit off them directly while simultaneously being able to steal any ideas that generous investors offer to the public.

Patents make sense because now it gives the inventor a choice, they can either putt heir idea to the public domain, or they can patent it and control who can use their idea, and how, and under what conditions. In fact it is quite common to patent ideas when you have the intention of open-sourcing them because a patent lets you control the conditions under which an invention can be shared or modified freely as well. I can dictate that anyone who improves on my invention and releases their improvement under the same conditions are welcome to utilize my patent royalty free, while any commercial uses of my idea are forbidden entirely.

So in a sense allowing for patents is exactly the way you can enable people to create copyleft-like licenses on inventions (which do not work in the case of copyrights).

On the flip side in a world with patents a independent inventor can make money and be self sufficient inventing ideas, patenting and selling it. In a world without patents such a person has no recourse from income and the only option for an inventor is to be an employee and a "slave" for a company that can force the person to give up million dollar ideas for a low pittance of an hourly wage.

Most people have patents backwards, they empower the people first and foremost, at least when the original laws and intents of patents are honored.

@jcbrand

#introductions Hello! I'm a Computer Science student interested in the art of computer programming.

Seen this several times recently: User1 opens an issue, User2 confirms it's an issue, User3 later asks about progress... and then it's stale-bot time, time to just close it as "wontfix". There may be other discussion in between, vague unspecific comments from a dev, attempted pull requests by users that are also ignored, some barely-related drama sometimes; but in the end any long-tail issue - even precise, clearly articulated ones - falls victim to the ineffable stale-bot in these projects. #github #rant

Hi everyone! I'm a sound engineer with an interest in all things science and tech. I'm looking forward to seeing interesting discussions in this space.
#introductions

#introductions #philosophy #science #mathematics #physics #philosophy #linux #freesoftware #opensource

Sealed vs Unsealed #PineTime @PINE64 ... So exciting! 😀

Hello everyone! Another dev/open source software enthusiast here. I'm excited to be part of the community. #introductions