News and Discussions about Reddit
Welcome to !reddit. This is a community for all news and discussions about Reddit.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules
Rule 1- No brigading.
**You may not encourage brigading any communities or subreddits in any way. **
YSKs are about self-improvement on how to do things.
Rule 2- No illegal or NSFW or gore content.
**No illegal or NSFW or gore content. **
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Posts and comments which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-Reddit posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
Rule 7- You can't harass or disturb other members.
If you vocally harass or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
:::spoiler Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
view the rest of the comments
It’s a legal tool that turns ideas into property. This allows capital to exercise power over it and profit through it, and on top of that inhibits innovation. So l’d say there is no use or abuse, it’s a bad legal framework that doesn’t achieve societal benefits.
So to be fair it's not like all patents are" I have an idea and I want to stop others from using it". Many are companies submitting technical documentation that the company spent millions of dollars to develop, they should get a head start on using it. After the patent expires everyone can use the tech that the original developer may have kept as trade secret instead. Of course they can be abused like most other things but there is definitely a use case for patents.
Of course it does… patent law as it stands goes hand-in-hand with capitalist economic systems. Patents are intended to incentivize investing in ideas. (That’s a lot of ‘i’s!)
On the other hand, people who come up with ideas are workers, too, and a system devoid of any means to discourage/prevent parasitic engagement—wherein others reap the rewards of these workers’ labor—doesn’t seem like the opposite of capitalism, either.
Edit: To be clear, I think current regulations need improvement, and am in no way defending patent trolls. If the intend goal of patent law does not align with its observed ramifications, the law should be changed.
It requires capital to obtain a patent and to defend a patent, workers are inherently excluded from this proces.
Again, you’ve identified a problem with the current implementation of patent law, not patents themselves.
I'm starting to get the feeling that we are both repeating ourselves, but this is not a just a side effect, it is systematic. Turning an idea into property means only capital can play the game. In effect patents do two things: Firstly they inhibits innovation, the exact opposite of what they are supposed to do, this should be ground enough to get rid of them. Second they entrench big players, big players have more money to play the patent game and so tend to win patent fights regardless of merit. So besides not achieving their so called stated goal they also have a huge negative externality. And all this before we even take patent trolls into account.