Comment by keeda
5 months ago
For many, many reasons, I suspect patents will become much more important now. After all, it's the ideas that matter now. Which I maintain, has always been the case, because "execution" is nothing more than a series of smaller ideas, except those typically needed money. How convenient for those with capital!
Patents have the drawback of being expensive and very slow to acquire, but having worked on a bunch, they are uniquely suited to be radically optimized by GenAI.
Also patents are very flawed in practice, but the only real protection that is left. Copyright is meaningless when, as people have done, you can reproduce entire saas products by feeding AI screenshots.
Intellectual Property as a whole has been in need for a revamp for a while now, but it's even more critical in the age of AI.
Patents aren't going to cover the vast majority of what exists as code because patents only cover inventions and not common every day code.
> Copyright is meaningless when, as people have done, you can reproduce entire saas products by feeding AI screenshots.
What do you mean?
> What do you mean?
People are taking screenshots of existing products and feeding them to AI to reproduce them from scratch. From this site: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47257803
> Patents aren't going to cover the vast majority of what exists as code because patents only cover inventions and not common every day code.
Agreed, but as we're finding out, everyday code is now cheap enough that there will be questions about how much of it is worth protecting... and, given the unclear stance on AI-generated code, maybe even if it is protectable at all.
Yes, the bar for patents is way too high for every day code, but you can always get one by making the claims narrow enough. I think that will actually serve one of the underlying goals of patents by incentivizing people to build things that are actually novel and non-obvious rather than just a slight variation of another project.
For projects where there is absolutely nothing technically novel (which is rarely true, cf "claims narrow enough") moats could be in hoarding data, network effects, and the like.
Note, I'm not necessarily happy about all this, this is just how I think it could play out absent larger changes to IP laws.
>Also this comment where backend code could be reproduced wholesale from the APIs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47259485
Do you mean deduced instead of reproduced?
>Agreed, but as we're finding out, everyday code is now cheap enough that there will be questions about how much of it is worth protecting... and, given the unclear stance on AI-generated code, maybe even if it is protectable at all.
AI generated code is likely not protectable at all under copyright, but that was expected by anyone who follows this area of the law seriously.
> Yes, the bar for patents is way too high for every day code, but you can always get one by making the claims narrow enough.
Not really, and if you did it would likely not be enforceable because the getting past a §101 motion isn't likely.
>Note, I'm not necessarily happy about all this, this is just how I think it could play out absent larger changes to IP laws.
I'm not sure any of it is a bad thing. Why should AI generated code be protectable under copyright? It can still be protected by trade secret, which seems fairly sufficient for what it ultimately is.
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Patents are what allowed the industrial revolution to happen. No one is bringing a cotton gin from idea to design to manufacturing to market if the second you release it every manufacturing company in the world can start making their won.
I wonder how things were invented before patents.
The king paid for it
This strawman pops up often. The purpose of IP is to "promote" progress. The word was carefully chosen.
And luckily we have years of research, empirical and otherwise, showing the impact of IP on innovation and the arts. It's a very complex, multi-dimensional topic where outcomes vary depending on a combination of things like industry, subject matter, time frame, level of economic development of the country, strictness of enforcement, and more.
However overall the impact of IP is much more positive than HN would think, largely because the material and discourse that has gotten airtime here is something that aligns more with the "information wants to be free" crowd.