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Comment by ghotli | Hacker News Reader

Patents for things like this make me feel like committing civil disobedience. Bolding the first few letters is something that needs patent protection? Give me a break. That's not a thing, man.

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no reason for this to have a patent at all

the author could've trademarked the name and sell it as "the original"

personally the only app i know that has the technology is Reeder RSS reader, although i've never found it convenient

What if we underline the first character(s)? Can we get specs from those who grant software patents? What is included, what is not?

_Patented_

Patents shouldn't be a thing full stop.

Why spend my forcefully taken tax money protecting imaginary rights of a few inventors?

I understand the problem of industrial spies and creating something whose recipe is hard to find and easy to make, but I don't see why we should solve it societally for the large corporations which happen to have this issue.

Let them spend money suing their customers who violated some ToS and reverse engineered the formula, let them worry about vetting or doing suing their own employees. And if it's too expensive to pursue, consider it a natural tax of the market.

If they're creating something that will give value over a long period of time, they're already making more than the rest of the population who's paying for their patent bs and their copyright enforcement.

I agree that the current patent system is broken, but there are a lot of situations where I think protecting an invention for some time is warranted.

Let's say you invest 10 years of your life trying to develop a new cure or drug, but some other company reverse engineers the formula and sells it for cheaper, preventing you from even recoup your investment costs.

This might not be a problem for large corporations, but nobody else would be incentivized to try to create or develop something cutting edge, which might have a high risk of failure or take a long time to see through.

I think once you've actually sussed out the expenses of patents and copyrights they outweigh the benefits. The system as it stands is a product of the system as it was designed. It's real cute and nice at the outset, but lending monopolies to individuals (corporations or otherwise) means concentration of wealth, means outsized political power, means longer more inequitous parents which ultimately gives rise to inefficient rentiers. This defeats the competitive elements necessary for a free market.

Like have you read about the pharma companies that pay out generic mfgs to not manufacture patent-lapsed medication? This allows the patent-holder to buoy their prices and continue the monopolistic racket for medicines without competition. And pharma is held to a different standard.

If we take your example, we'll assume the competition's process is more efficient, well they can't patent that so the inventor can fund and build a factory on par with the competition. Consumer benefits. As it stands one party could design the drug, the other the process, and they could compete inefficiently with royalty bargaining or some such, ultimately leaving little benefit to the consumer. More realistically a conglomerate buys out everything related and sets the price for maximum ROI - supported by the system which has been driven to the inevitable conclusion of artificial monopolies leveraging their outsized wealth in the political arena.

Mentioning the propensity for larger established companies to buy out nascent companies and strangle their products which is enabled by patent law and has lost the collective a considerable amount of goods.

Except they're never used that way in practise. The small startup or inventor doesn't have enough resources to litigate if someone violates their patent so it only serves as a tax on inventors in exchange for not beingnsued by a patent troll for using their own ideas.

It’s not about protecting their rights, it’s about encouraging corporations to release the processes of their invention. The point is that we provide legally enforced protection in exchange for it entering the public domain after a few years. The alternative is corporate secrets that never become public (unless stolen), like the formula for Coca Cola.

Patents generally don't these days either, the patents are so vague and general that you can't reproduce the device using the patent or even know which of the 50 off-handedly mentioned methods is used to implement a general idea like 'synchronizing some clocks to measure a thing but using radio waves or the internet'

A sane system would require registration andnsource and only last a handful of years.

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