Comment by graycat | Hacker News Reader

Comment by graycat | Hacker News Reader

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Ideas? Can an idea be really, REALLY valuable?

Can an idea get a lot of value via a patent or held as a trade secret?

Uh, let's see: From Bell Labs, the transistor.

They saw that it was so valuable they deliberately didn't patent it and, instead, gave it to the world for free -- that's in effect what they did, but there may be legal details, and I'm not a lawyer.

Suppose that now we had to pay a penny a transistor ......?

Uh, the laser? Not just one that fills a large airplane and is powerful enough to shoot down a missile but the ones the size of a grain of rice and light the long-haul optical fibers for the backbone of the Internet?

How 'bout the amplifiers on the optical fibers?

I'm not a lawyer, but how 'bout RSA encryption?

And the FFT (fast Fourier transform)?

And mRNA for creating vaccines? I know; I know; some people see the mRNA for Covid as naughty, bad, ugly, ...?

Well, there were the Phase III trials, randomized, placebo controlled, double blind, reported in

"Efficacy and Safety of the mRNA-1273 SARS-CoV-2 Vaccine", New England Journal of Medicine, February 4, 2021, 384:403-416

at

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa2035389

with efficacy 94% and safety 100% -- uh, for just how the efficacy arithmetic is done might want to check the paper.

Yes, the safety was from ~16,000 persons, and with 1 billion persons maybe safety will be lower than 100%.

There are various error correcting codes, maybe some buried in hardware devices.

It does appear that James Simons had some ideas that are valuable and not easy for others to copy.

> they deliberately didn't patent it

If you'll check the historical record you'll find, for example, patents US2524035A (Bardeen&Brattain, Three-electrode circuit element utilizing semiconductive materials, oldest priority 1948-02-26) and US2569347A (Shockley, Circuit element utilizing semiconductive material, oldest priority 1948-06-26).

> How 'bout the amplifiers on the optical fibers?

patents.google.com reports 65279 hits for "optical fiber amplifier"

> Uh, the laser?

The original invention of the laser led to patent disputes and lawsuits that weren't settled until 1987.

> RSA encryption

US4405829A (Rivest, Shamier, Alderman, Cryptographic communications system and method, filed 1977 awarded 1983)

> And the FFT (fast Fourier transform)?

There's an entire category for this, G06F17/142, with 11186 entries: https://patents.google.com/?q=G06F17%2f142

Thanks for the history of legal material on patents for the technology.

My understanding of the transistor is that Bell Labs gave it to the world for free use by anyone. For the exact legal steps they took to accomplish this -- I'm not a lawyer.

For the FFT, amazing patent activity: There was a lot to the FFT -- not all for just some 2^n numbers for positive integer n. There was a book I lost in a disaster -- was written at MIT and full of really tricky extensions of the basic FFT ideas. Curiously I can't find any mention of the book anywhere on the Internet. Was the book withdrawn as some part of US national security?

For RSA, okay, there's a patent. Did the three guys ever get any revenue from that?

I agree with the common remark, that this thread seems to agree with, "Ideas are easy; execution is hard" and "80% of success is just showing up", etc. Also agree that tough, as in the discussion in this thread, to get a technical cofounder ....

But I also wanted to point out that sometimes there are some quite powerful ideas that were not at all "easy".

Maybe the ideas resulted in gushers of revenue so that "execution" was easy.

My real view is that, unique ideas can be darned valuable, the key to being more successful than all the competitors. The ideas maybe are protected only as trade secrets or intellectual property -- i.e., don't tell anyone.

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