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Comment by Towaway69 | Hacker News Reader

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> Typical capitalistic product?

Quite the opposite: patents are artificial monopolies issued by the country - thus the actual opposite of free markets.

I think the problems with IP rights startend when the law allowed companies to be treated as persons, from there on it was just downhill. Instead of protecting the inventor we started weaponising IP rights.

You know the latin root for the word 'corporation' is 'corpus' meaning 'body'. A corporation in English common law is literally a fictitious person created for the purpose of performing business activities independent of its shareholders.

The fact that corporations inherit many of the legal abilities of people in our system (including property rights like intellectual property) is a good thing.

> The fact that corporations inherit many of the legal abilities of people in our system is a good thing

In general I agree with this. But on the specific case of intellectual property I do not.

They are nice for a reason, though. They're a temporary monopoly in exchange for open access to the patented mechanism. They're far better than copyright, basically.

Yet most patented inventions are pretty obvious on how to copy without the need to look at the patent, same with this case.

So we have no benefit of "open access to the mechanism" but with the deleterious effect of the "temporary (1/5 of a long human life) monopoly".

Well, the equation there is simple, as evidenced by the fact that many companies still opt for trade secrets instead of patents.

Patents solve the first mover disadvantage in game theory. If you come up with a better solution, please share.

I don't claim that I have an easy solution for this problem (at best, I have some fragmentary ideas). I just claim that patents (and copyright) are actually quite the opposite of free markets.

They are like stop signs and stop lights. It prevents you from driving like you want, but makes everyone more free to get to where they want to go.

Are we speaking of patents or the product made from those patents? Are we speaking of how capitalism enforces permanent growth and profit requirements upon us so that most anything that can be monetised will be monetised.

Even feeding the homeless is monetised by the state[1] - in the form of fines.

I for one can no longer distinguish between capitalistic greed and profiteering via patents, food, housing, warmth, freedoms, user data, ....

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/aug/04/texas-volunt...

Capitalism is literally defined by the ability to exercise capital to accumulate more of it, which is literally the only way for a monopoly to exist. By definition, capitalism has nothing to do with so-called "free markets".

And "free markets" are the results of showing up with a Navy to help negotiate a trade deal.

Free market = liberalism.

Capitalism is about owning the means of exchange and production, and how to distribute the generated capital.

[edit] which is fine, but rely a bit much on the 'benevolent dictator' trope recently.

It is worthwhile to distinguish between capitalism and a free market. A free market engenders capitalism, which (with sufficient accumulation of wealth and creeping market and regulatory capture) creates forces that oppose the free market.

Better then the alternative (no product, starvation)

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