Comment on Anon is a gamer
Soapbox@lemmy.zip 1 week agoImagine you are an inventor and come up with a brilliant new thing, and start a business to sell it. You even bring in people to help manufacture and make them a co-op. Doing everything ethically right. Selling a quality product that people want.
Then a multinational conglomerate sees it is selling well and they use their immense resources to scale up production, produce and sell it for half the price you can.
You and your co-op go out of business and megacorps shareholders pocket even more dividends.
Thats why patents should exist in a capitalist hellscape.
Dsklnsadog@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 week ago
That argument proves the problem is scale and market power, not lack of patents.
Giving everyone a legal weapon sounds fair in theory, but in practice the biggest companies have the best lawyers, the biggest patent portfolios, and the most money to litigate. Patents often become a moat for incumbents, not a shield for small inventors.
A pro-market answer would be: reduce barriers to entry, punish fraud, enforce contracts, maybe protect trade secrets narrowly, but don’t ban competitors from building better versions.
Soapbox@lemmy.zip 1 week ago
I still think the patents need limitations.
1 year limit if not actively being used for a product in production.
10yr total limit.
Something like a video game mechanic should be limited to 2 years from first use.
Patents should be a limited way to protect and support innovation. Patent hoarding needs to be stopped.
Drug patents should have same limitations unless its something the government deems too critical, and then the company should be reimbursed for their research costs and the patent killed.
Dsklnsadog@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 week ago
Your proposal is definitely less bad than the current system, but it still assumes innovation needs a government referee deciding who gets exclusivity, for how long, and when taxpayers should compensate private research.
That’s the part I can’t get behind.
If the product is not commercially viable without monopoly protection or public reimbursement, maybe the business model is the issue. And if the government reimburses the company, that just means society absorbs the risk while the company keeps the upside.
Who decides the reimbursement amount? Who pays for failed research? Taxpayers? Competing companies? Consumers?
Private companies should be rewarded by the market when they create value, not guaranteed protection from competition and then reimbursed when the state decides the invention is important.
Shorter patents reduce the damage, but they don’t remove the contradiction: a “limited monopoly” is still a monopoly.
Waraugh@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 week ago
I’m not sure which one of you I agree with. I think both kind of. I’d like for there to be a way for a small investor or team to get their feet under them and build a successful business but I also think it’s naive to think that’s what ever happens, usually it’s giant companies submitting endless unused patents or buying them to add to their closet of unused patents.
I’ve seen so many cool innovative products people have come up with just to have them swiped at scale by China. I always try to buy the more expensive original when I notice. I’m not upset at China or trying to throw shade either but it’s got to really suck to be those folks that go through all the work to design something build everything up and within a week of sales see clones hitting Amazon and being pushed over yours by the algorithms.
I think in general I just hate everything about how things are and feel like original inventors, designers, and creators should have a protected incentive to come up with the cool stuff they come up with.