I cannot think of a better way to actually impede humanity's progress than to put up artificial barriers to techniques developed to help spur innovation and growth. The patent system is mind numbingly stupid as it absolutely STIFLES innovation.
The raw dollar value R&D in the private sector is higher, but that's accounting gymnastics for tax purposes, not actual R&D.
Or kept purely secret
Most people that do real R&D do it because they want to, not because they're rewarded with patents. They want to make a better camera, a better camera format, and sell it. And nobody learns how to make something by reading the patents, in the past 50+ years they're practically unreadable legalese. Once upon a time they had diagrams for mechanical devices or chemical processes, but now they're just ideas that many people faced with similar challenges and available technologies would have considered, except the first to bother to patent a general idea like "compress raw sensor data before debayering" now gets to be a massive pain in the ass to people actually doing R&D to make things.
What we really need is much more strict requirements for what qualifies as a truly unique innovation worthy of patent protection. None of this BS about virtual shopping carts on eCommerce sites, or playable minigames on video game loading screens.
This is an impressive feat to be sure, but to compare it to modern EUV lithography is like comparing a crossbow to an ICBM
Regardless, anyone could do this type of fabrication in their garage given removing the legal and technical barriers that keep EUV technology behind lock and key.
The idea that the risk of patent infringement is the only thing preventing him from building a chip comparable to a modern Intel or AMD CPU in his garage today is absurd.
1. https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2021/12/10/asmls-high-na-euv-lithog...
For what it's worth, patents are limited to a 20 year duration. This is (was) fine in some slower moving industries, but completely ridiculous for something like consumer electronics or software.
Everybody's gotta eat. Would you work your job if you weren't getting paid?
Ahh, MONEY! Which is as made up as it gets. This person is worth more than that person because this computer says so and it has to be TRUE, or else society wouldn't work. We are about to find out real quick how the world works again, and I am warning everyone here, if you think you are safe because of money, the world is going to humble you.
Besides, patents are not the only way to protect R&D.
It's simply not true to say that innovation or R&D would grind to a halt if patents ceased to exist. If anything, we might even see the complete opposite, because it massively lowers the barriers to entry.
Bad patents and their negative impact on the world far, far outweigh the positive impact from the good ones (if there is such a thing). Scrap the whole damn system.