• CosmoNova@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    Figures. Patents are the backbone of capitalism. Some say it invented capitalism as we know it.

    • Elvith Ma'for@feddit.org
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      1 day ago

      I mean, I get the idea of patents. If there were no protection of “ideas”, some random person could have one, try to bring it to market but could just be outplayed by a big corporation with enough money to copy this idea and sell it everywhere before he can even start production. They have more resources and money, but might not have had that idea. There should be some protection. Problem is, that these are also abused by the big corporations, so… Maybe we need to fix this somehow.

      • Specter@piefed.social
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        2 hours ago

        ut could just be outplayed by a big corporation with enough money to copy this idea and sell it everywhere before he can even start production.

        Which is also why Anti-Trust laws exist in pretty much every country and, when enforced, actually stop companies from becoming gargantuan Hydras.

        In the US they haven’t been implemented for too long, of course.

      • Hank BP@programming.dev
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        7 hours ago

        Greed should be banned, not the patents. I feel like if wealth taxes were 50%+, people wouldn’t be incentived to jack up prices like this.

      • Doomsider@lemmy.world
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        9 hours ago

        This is how it was before patent law. The sciences, arts, and commerce existed for thousands of years without these corporate laws. It is about creating artificial scarcity, which is an incredibly dumb concept in our modern world.

        You need to eliminate the thought of the big guy stealing ideas from the little guy. This is propaganda used to play on our emotions. Intelectual Property benefits an extreme minority at the cost of billions of lives.

        • HugeNerd@lemmy.ca
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          7 hours ago

          The sciences, arts, and commerce existed for thousands of years without these corporate laws.

          lol they also existed with hidden and encrypted ideas to, you know, protect intellectual property…

          “This is propaganda used to play on our emotions”

          Oh do tell

          " at the cost of billions of lives"

          😂

          • Doomsider@lemmy.world
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            7 hours ago

            That literally has nothing to do with patents nowadays. No one is hiding anything anymore, it is about artificial scarcity to collect monopoly rents.

            The fact that you deny that we have already lost billions of lives because of corporations trying to extract monopoly rents is your perogative. It is stupid and ignorant, but your choice.

            • AnyOldName3@lemmy.world
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              2 hours ago

              The justification for patents is that after a (relatively) short period of being under patent, because patents have to disclose how inventions work, the idea isn’t secret and anyone can use it. The patent system is the whole reason why companies don’t and can’t hide their inventions anymore. If we just got rid of the patent system wholesale, they’d go back to keeping things secret. That might be a big problem, or it might mean that, because anything that’s been reverse-engineered would be fair game, more things end up available sooner, depending on whether companies can obfuscate things well enough that it takes longer for a hobbyist to figure out than the patent would have to expire.

      • Cellari@lemmy.world
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        17 hours ago

        It’s usually fixed with a good competition. No one corporate can abuse the system if viable competitions exists.

        But if I had to give some critique, then the duration for USA patent system is one that can create a money grab system by creating a costly dependency to a legacy system that has grown so long it is hard to replace.

        • Amju Wolf@pawb.social
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          11 hours ago

          Competition only works when the stuff you’re protecting can have competition. If it’s an algorithm that’s objectively better with no alternative, it doesn’t really work.

          • Cellari@lemmy.world
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            3 hours ago

            That’s not entirely fair to claim as so. There is competition like AV1, but it is lacking in marketing and brutality. Can’t really compete against big corporate if the goal is not to eat business profits from others like it is a vendetta.

        • whaleross@lemmy.world
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          15 hours ago

          Market liberalism is not the answer. It’s what we have today. It ends up with the giants eating the competition and using any advantage they have got. Only active legislation works against legal abuse against those that see it as sport.

          • Cellari@lemmy.world
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            3 hours ago

            Legislation would help, but so would a vendetta against a big corporation. Can’t really compete if your corporate is assimilated or not planning to eat away the profits from competition. :D

            Not claiming that is all it would take

      • Grandwolf319@sh.itjust.works
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        1 day ago

        You should be able to own the right to bring a novel idea into production, after it’s generally available then it should have no protection.

        Basically if you come up with an idea, you get to get the first initial rounds of profits to make it worth your while, that’s it.

          • stupidcasey@lemmy.world
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            3 hours ago

            Not really.

            I mean it is technically, but software companies have the largest profit margin of any other company in history, that is the extra they make after paying all the bills including developers.

            the only thing that even comes close is finance, and it is still off by orders of magnitude.

            It is so skewed that it is literally breaking the entire economic model.

            Ideas are cheap, and can spread instantly without costing extra.

            The indie developer a person that doesn’t need a company wasn’t a thing after the industrial revolution anyone who could compete was a novelty but now you can spin up a factory that serves everyone in the world with a day’s work. people wouldn’t accept it but that’s just because competition is so strong that people are picky.

            Software is a completely different thing than physical goods and it needs to be regulated as such unless you want the economy to break.

    • WesternInfidels@feddit.online
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      1 day ago

      Patents are a (relatively speaking) newfangled trick to turn ideas into legal “capital.” In the same way that a corporation “is” a person.

      The backbone of capitalism? I’m not following that.

      • ParlimentOfDoom@piefed.zip
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        21 hours ago

        Patents are a way to spread knowledge, whole still offering some [time limited] protections. Before them, trade secrets were the norm, and way too much knowledge was lost with it’s creators.