this post was submitted on 20 May 2026
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patents should not exist
The original idea behind them had some merit: in exchange for showing everyone else exactly how to do a cool new thing, you got to temporarily be the only one to profit from it. They've devolved into parenting general ideas (see the shopping cart patent) and fucking over anyone who finds a way to make the idea work, though.
I disagree, if I spend time and money to figure out how to solve a problem efficiently, why shouldn't I get to profit from that idea?
The above only applies to hardware patents, software patents however should not extist.
Regardless, if a company are not actively using a patent, as in a product themselves or through licensing, for X years, then the patent should be void.
Of course it's work finding solutions to problems and you should be able to live off your work. And in capitalism, a patent sometimes is the only option to do so.
However, patents and other forms of "intellectual property" are absolutely illogical and amoral. Nobody ever made a completely new thing. Every innovation builds on so much knowledge accumulated by so many people that came before. It's absolutely nonsensical that an advancement that's 99 % an achievement of humanity and 1 % of a single person should belong to that single person.
I disagree, patents makes sense for normal citizens, it gives them a legal framework to fight against a company just taking the invention from them without compensation.
As for the 99% vs 1% contribution, remember that it is usually the last 1% of a project that consumes the most time.
That's a weak argument because everything used by normal citizens is, in practice, always used by the big corpos against the normal citizens in much greater quantity and with much more force.
Now that I think of it, it's no argument at all because I already admitted, that under capitalism, you might not have another choice to get paid for your work. That still doesn't make it morally good or logically sound.
Software patents don't exist in the real world. It's just those dumb Americans living in their fantasy world who do it. Dumb fucks
Why should you exclusively get to profit from that idea? In any case all innovation stands on the shoulders of giants supported by society at large. The idea of owning an idea in the first place is absurd, but setting that aside if someone will assert exclusive rights to an idea they should first repay society for all its indirect contributions to that idea, from past innovators to the workers whose labor makes it all possible. Or course this is impossible, meaning owning an idea automatically becomes absurd. And this is before we get to how pretty much all parents are based on publicly funded research. Government-granted monopolies should stay in the 19th century.
Because it is not really the idea specifically that you patent, you patent a method of making an idea work.