this post was submitted on 20 May 2026
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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.
Potato potato, the point still stands: It's impossible to come up with a new, say, car engine design without centuries' worth of thermodynamics and assorted physics, millennia's worth of metallurgy and the labor of hundreds if not thousands of people providing the food, water, electricity, manufactured goods, etc to make the act of innovation possible, and all those people have a claim to a piece of the pie.