Hacker News Reader

Comment by CalChris | Hacker News Reader

So keeping with Berkeley examples, should the Regents not have rights (copyright not patent) for BSD? That too became the foundation of the entire ecosystem. But the Regents defended those rights (which they give away for free) from the UNIX System Laboratories lawsuit. You can't defend what you don't have.

Full disclosure: my copy of Lions' Commentary was entered as evidence in that lawsuit.

View on HN

Maybe, but were there other cases where Berkeley helped the ecosystem instead of hurt it? How about elsewhere other than Berkeley?

I can point to a handful of technologies where the patents and copyrights got in the way without even thinking hard. I'm having a lot of trouble coming up with technology where the patents/copyrights helped spread it. Unix may be the only one I can come up with.

So you think that patents and copyrights get in the way of the ecosystem. But what do you think motivates developers to invent in the first place? Without that motivation where would the ecosystem be?

Famous case is that when Japan opened up to the world, they sent ambassadors out to learn what was going on on the outside. One said, “we have looked about us to see what nations are the greatest, so that we can be like them. We said ‘what is it that makes the United States such a great nation?’ and we investigated and found that it was patents, and we will have patents.”

http://www.iphalloffame.com/korekiyo_takahashi/

> But what do you think motivates developers to invent in the first place? Without that motivation where would the ecosystem be?

Developers develop because they feel a need to develop. No more, no less. Painting, music, writing, etc. are similar.

Creators create because they must create.

I'd say open source invalidates the assumption that there would be no advancement without patents.

All the while the evidence has piled up that patents actually don't promote advancement anymore: https://www.forbes.com/asap/2002/0624/044_print.html

> http://www.iphalloffame.com/korekiyo_takahashi/

Interesting, but I would point out that he was making those statements at a point in time where the US was literally ripping off anything and everything in the UK that was patented (aka: what China has currently been doing to the US).

That time period is, in fact, a prime example of advancement without strong patent protections.

The original Ethernet patent was an example of this. The license fees were low - $1000 [0] and it became a de facto standard. Token Ring was a competing network technology with considerably higher license fees [1]. Patent owners for subsequent Ethernet standards started out with similar terms but then started shaking down licensees [2].

The Bell Labs transistor patent may be another example. The initial license fees were $25k [3].

[0] https://books.google.com/books?id=qTkEAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA52&ots=...

[1] https://books.google.com/books?id=OFCXnqlSFKwC&lpg=PA709&dq=...

[2] https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2008/01/ftc-c...

[3] (pdf) http://repository.jmls.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1175&...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com