Comment by alerighi
24 days ago
The problem is that it doesn't work as such. We all know that Meucci invented the telephone but Bell patented it.
The patent office rarely care about it, they register whatever you want, and then lawyers of companies can sue you for using it without permission. Of course you can fight it in court and affirm it's prior art, if you have enough money to pay your lawyer, and do you have more money than OpenAI, Meta, Google? Probably not, so they will just shut you down, that is the sole reason for patents to exist, to preserve monopoly of big multinational companies.
And nowadays that patents are probably written and submitted not even by human but by AI, what stops a big tech with enough money for using a model to generate millions of trivial patent, submit them, and get them approved, for then another AI to search for their usage and sue you for using it?
> what stops a big tech with enough money for using a model to generate millions of trivial patent
It requires a yearly payment and can get quite expensive [1]. There are application, examination, issuing and publishing fees for each patent. In contrast, publishing ideas online is free.
[1] https://www.uspto.gov/learning-and-resources/fees-and-paymen...
For a big tech the publishing fees are nothing in comparison to what they can revenue on patents. Let's say that they AI generate 1000 patents and let's say the cost is 1000$ for each one, it's sufficient that only 1 of them are usable in a court case to sue a company for millions to make it worth it.
Publishing ideas online doesn't really matter, a big company can sue you and you have already lost, because you don't have the money to pay lawyers to defend you, even if you are in right.
There is no justice in our system, unfortunately who owns the money just rules. We don't live in a democracy, we live in something that is not much different of medieval feudalism, possibly much worse indeed.