Comment by gammateam
6 years ago
> More importantly, sharing work publicly keeps the project can alive and inspires others to continue developing!
Which a patent does too, just with a license or 20 years later. It keeps people from reinventing the wheel and gives the disclosure rights even if they didn't have the infrastructure to create or monetize on their own. This isn't one of those nefarious software patents where the whole thing would be obsolete within 5 years, this is LED books, which simply becomes more feasible as transistor sizes shrink and battery technology improves, perfect for a 20 year exclusivity period before falling into the public domain where it can be vastly more practical to create in 2033.
It does seem odd to stick with an intellectual property system that is so obviously deficient in it's stated purpose of "improving the useful arts and sciences". Current patent law amounts to a barrier to entry for most small potential competitors in any market where defensible IP is required. Big companies can cross-license or litigate around issues but small players are locked out of the markets they might want to compete in because the costs are prohibitive. Yet another example of the American system having failed to protect competition and encouraging cartelisation.
> [a] patent [keeps thhe project alive] too
> perfect for a 20 year exclusivity period
So for 20 years, if I wish to create and sell a book with transistors I have to license the idea from google (that is if they're even willing to give me a license)?
And somehow having to go through that legal loophole will keep the art of creating LED books alive? You seriously believe that?
Does the patent have complex details which would take longer than 20 years for someone to independently discover about creating LED books? If so, people do save time by waiting 20 years and then reading the patent, but that seems extremely unlikely.
> So for 20 years, if I wish to create and sell a book with transistors I have to license the idea from google (that is if they're even willing to give me a license)?
No. Google wasn't supposed to try and patent it.
I responded to a very specific piece of the article which seemed to ignore that patent applications functioning as prior art is available to subculture enthusiasts too.
The whole concluding paragraph was about making ideas that other people can build from, it wasn't about LED books in general. They want ideas to be available for others to build from but don't want others to patent it, ignoring that attempting to patent it yourself also fixes this, no matter how you actually use the patent or failed/abandoned application.
(Although, I'll concede that patenting is an expensive bet that not everyone would have the money or risk tolerance for.)
The problems with patents as prior art for new inventions are manifold:
- The common advice is for practitioners to avoid learning about existing patents, because this knowledge increases liability in case you are found to infringe. This means that the body of patented work is really only useful for patent lawyers, rather than for inventors.
- Similarly, patents are not written in ways to instruct practitioners to use techniques, but instead crafted in legal terms to claim broad areas of application while skirting previously filed patent claims. This again makes the patent library only useful to lawyers.
- In areas where patents are not common, there is a green field for patent applications that patent common techniques. This happened in software and business methods, and the article suggests it is happening in the junction of enthusiasts and crafts.
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> It keeps people from reinventing the wheel
Actually it forces people to reinvent the wheel in possibly worse ways.
Or possibly better. Thinking of the explosion of DNA sequencing technology over the past decade, I'm kind of grateful that people reinvented the wheel about a half-dozen times (Solexa/Illumina, 454, IonTorrent, Solid, PacBio, ONT, etc.)