US patent office rules that artificial intelligence cannot be a legal inventor

(edit: artwork is probably not a great 1-1 example here because it is not patentable.)

Free Markets are about competition and consumer rights.

Capitalism - from what I've read - is about a minority having the decision making power with regards to capital allocation.

So the USA has a free market system ran by capitalists. I would argue that IP laws can be favorable from the perspective of Capitalism but not the Free Market.

The capitalists own the patents and have the wealth to _incentivize_ the law makers to make IP protection laws.

IP is a bargain between state and author. The state agrees to let the author charge rent on their IP for a limited period of time, thus incentivizing the creation of that IP. In return, the public gets to enjoy that IP’s existence - and eventually enjoy it for free.

How long should the limit be? Here lies the debate. The longer the period, the greater the incentive to invest in production of the IP. For example, a movie studio spends $300m+ on a movie because they expect to gain that back via an income stream that lasts for many decades. If their period of protection was only, say, 5 years, their return on investment would be less and thus the investment amount would be less.

So one way to think about the copyright protection length is to ask: do we want to live in a world where investing $300m+ in a movie is a rational thing to do, or would we be content with movies costing no more than $30m, or $3m?

Sure, celebrities are paid too much, but for some variation of this argument you may agree that reduced copyright terms limit the type of movies that can be made.

You can substitute movies for pharmaceuticals if you like - longer patent terms mean a bigger payoff for investing in new medical research. Tweak patent length and you change what drugs exist.

I personally disagree with the patentability of some things (like software), and with the length of copyright, but I also like that movies like, say, Lord of the Rings exist, so it’s not a trivial issue for me. I want a healthy public domain but I also would be sad if the Bakshi LOTR version was all we ever had.

I think you missed the memo.

Capitalism is about socializing losses, and privatizing profits.

It's about building moats to prevent competition.

It's about lobbying to raise the drawbridge after you won.

That's the reality of US capitalism.

If you want to see a billionaire smile, just say "Capitalism is all about competition." I guarantee it will make his day. You might even get a pat on the head!

Given that observation, it is natural to expect that anything which can maximize the wealth of the most powerful individuals will be adopted into law (since by definition the most powerful are the ones that can influence law making the most). So you have patent laws, you have propaganda and laws against the threat of global warming, you have propaganda and laws against protections from Covid19 etc.

Coincidentally, capitalism-in-practice abhors competition. "Competition is for losers" as the old adage goes - the winners are the ones who have no competition at all. Corporations will generally go out of their way to avoid competing directly with other corporations, as that is usually perceived as a race to the bottom for profits and prices. It is often preferred to find separate niches or expand the market rather than going for direct competition, unless one corporation feels like they have a good chance of monopolizing a particular market after they start competing.

(Unfortunately, both ways lead to the concentration of power in a few hands—either the hands of those with the most wealth to advance their individual agenda, or the hands of those with the power to make their individual agenda the collective agenda.)

Before that there were other cultural and political upheavals where the victors re-wrote history and changed the culture of China.

So at least to me it is not clear what Chinese culture will look like in 50 years let alone a 100.

If that were the case, we wouldn't have the concept of "the West". The West is a collectivist idea.

As a matter of fact, "the West" is even more of a collectivist idea than china since china is a nation but "the West" is a collection of nations centered around race/culture.

For china to be "collectivistic" on our level, they'd have to build up an idea of "the East" or "East Asia" Or "Asia" to counter "the West". They, being too shortsighted or individualistic, haven't created such an idea/institution.

The "individualistic" west and "collectivist" east is nonsense. People are people and it's the same all around. Was the US, british empire or nazi germany any less collectivistic than china today? Is white supremacy or german nationalism any less collectivistic than chinese nationalism or japanese nationalism?

I don't see the difference.

And the ones that aren't incremental are mostly just prophetic and useless to society. E.g. use VR to train surgeons or perform surgery. I bet there's many patents out there like that and if you followed them on the day they were filed you'd only kill patients.

I sense the rabbit hole of "how do we know?".

It's a bold move to encode that into law when we don't know if that woll hold true in some decades.