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Comment by somat | Hacker News Reader

The wright brothers patent was not on wing warping, it was on controlling a vehicle in the air. In short the Wright brothers did not invent the aeroplane they invented how to control a aeroplane.

https://www.wright-brothers.org/History_Wing/Wright_Story/Sh...

"We wish it to be understood, however, that our invention is not limited to this particular construction, since any construction whereby the angular relations of the lateral margins of the aeroplanes may be varied in opposite directions with respect to the normal planes of said aeroplanes comes within the scope of our invention."

Some people (Curtis) felt this claim was far too encompassing and should not be enforced. But I don't know, These guys just spent a decade working out an entirely new discipline, aeronautical control. And you don't think they deserve exclusive exploitation rights to that discipline for the next 20 years?

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> And you don't think they deserve exclusive exploitation rights to that discipline for the next 20 years?

20 years is the midpoint between the Wright Brother’s flight and operational jet fighters. They won the race but it was very much a competition. If Orville and Wilbur didn’t cross the line first then Maxim or Langley would have. They all built on George Cayley’s work.

So no, I don’t think the first one to file a plausible patent should get exclusive rights. It should at least extend to contemporaries. And we should consider the cost to innovation when breakthroughs are artificially constrained for what amounts to multiple technological generations.

Very much this. The incentive to create and invent is often largely financial, however that incentive need not be constructed as “winner takes all” rather we should lift each other up in our mutual accomplishments.

Unfortunately in my own ruminating on the topic the only practical alternatives seem to be one or more variations on the scary boogey man of socialism.

> The incentive to create and invent is often largely financial, however that incentive need not be constructed as “winner takes all” rather we should lift each other up in our mutual accomplishments.

The Wrights definitely were in it for the money.

The government project was the Langley Prototype, which cost 20 times more than what the Wrights spent, and fell into the Potomac like a sack of wet cement.

> the scary boogey man of socialism

For good reason. Socialism's track record is pretty bad. They're always running out of other peoples' money.

Certainly socialism is a heavy and dangerous solution to most problems, the critiques of it are many, and of the many most are fair.

I say boogeyman not to imply it is without problems but rather to say that in the problem spaces that it is often deplored the incumbent alternative is often categorically worse for all those who do not directly benefit from it, which is usually a supermajority at a minimum. Thus, to make the incumbent more tolerable a caricature of an idea is brought forth to scare those who would otherwise support an aspirational idealist into backing the known “lesser” evils.

> Socialism's track record is pretty bad

However the track record for developed countries communally sharing "intellectual property" is much much better. Universities, open source, and public domain all have some crossover with the ideals of socialism.

Yes, communism has repeatedly failed spectacularly.

The softer socialism of public welfare has worked (so far) for many countries including the US. Although I'm skeptical about the future given modern demographics and our governments' choices to appease a majority. The governments of most developed countries smell socialist to me. I'm from New Zealand and most private income/property is taxed up the wahoo to pay for our social welfare programs: it doesn't take much squinting to see my own society as broadly socialist.

Somehow I see people in the US complaining that the Chinese are beating the US at capitalism (regular complaints of price undercutting and monopolistic behaviours) - what's weird since the Chinese are supposed to be pinkos.

The Chinese switched from communism to free markets. Prosperity resulted.

Hybrid system, actually. No 100% pure system survived, ever. Be capitalist, communist, or technology philosophy bound. The GNU project tried to expand Unix with ITS editors (Emacs), utilities, ITS'like freedom and Lisp (Emacs and Scheme, again).

For a while the most used editor for Unixen wasn't vi or a vi descendant (vim), but Emacs, an editor alien to Unix. Knowing Vi was almost something 'mandatory' in order to manage servers' configuration under any Unix like OS, and ed on hard emergencies where even the terminal wasn't reliable enough.

Windows needs WSL2 and POSIX compat to be relevant today. Win32 itself doesn't run on top of a DOS like VM having almost a 95% of control of the machine, but on a VMS'like kernel with objects a la IBM.

MacOS itself it's just a Macintosh like UI made from NeXTStep scraps, a Mach kernel and pieces from a FreeBSD useland.

> switched from communism to free markets

Free markets are a component of capitalism just as they are a component of market socialism. China is a planned economy which stands in contrast to a market economy. But China has taken bits and pieces from many systems to create something that works for them, a hybrid that's probably specific to China alone. It's just capitalist enough to be able to interface with big wallets around the world, but we can all agree China itself is very far from being free market capitalism.

Compare China today with China of the Cultural Revolution.

I'm not a particular fan of intellectual property. It's a made-up form of property, and seems to be more of an impediment to progress than a help.

I'm not joking - the D language is as open source as possible. We give it away for free.

As I see it, fully voluntary socislism where people share and cooperate because they just feel like it, works exceedingly well. It also naturally regulates itself as people will just abandon stuff that looks iffy and work extra on stuff that is well run, fair, etc

When you force people to pitch, share, cooperate, etc, things start to don't work out so well and you start getting people that takes advantage of a system that mandates others to work for a cause no matter what, as well as people that will do whatever they can to not do their work.

Free markets are based on voluntary cooperation. Socialism is coercive cooperation.

Ideal socialism is voluntary, just like ideal free markets.

I wonder whether your axiomatic belief is that we should all have freedom? Therefore you love the idea of free markets? I wonder if some of your "free market" comments would be better written in terms of freedom rather than economics.

Game theory and evolutionary stable strategies show the issues of cooperation versus defection.

Voluntary cooperation fails because power is required to enforce fairness/contracts and then the powerful can defect. That is independent of socialism or free markets.

Also authoritarianism and socialism are different things, even if history shows correlation. Socialism is a deeply tarred word, with radical differences in meaning (approximately equal to communism for many, or democracy for others).

If authoritarianism is a stable outcome, then it can be an outcome of free markets too.

Re your other thread: calling China a free market seems extremely odd, and basing any argument on that 'fact' is even odder. Edit: perhaps "Socialism is coercive cooperation" is similarly nonsensical.

> Ideal socialism is voluntary

There have been 20,000+ voluntary socialist communes set up in the US. They all failed. Socialism requires forcible coercion.

Wait, we had socialism in the US?

Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?

> Socialism's track record is pretty bad.

There aren't many pure socialist countries like there aren't many (any?) pure capitalist countries. Most of Europe operates in mixed mode, half socialist. Some countries are very bad (and against) at implementing any measures that directly benefit the lower classes (as opposed to the typical capitalist "trickle-down economics") so they vilify anything that has even the faintest smell of socialism.

> They're always running out of other peoples' money.

I wish people would stop parroting this as some sort of deep insight. Capitalists don't run out of other people's money but they do collect all of it. Ask the capitalists who sink other people's investments with no recourse. Ask the capitalists who get funded from people's pension funds, with "interesting" IPO strategies. Don't turn a blind eye for the sake of a remark which was witty a few decades ago and sounds just ignorant today.

> Capitalists don't run out of other people's money but they do collect all of it

No, they don't "collect all of it". Musk's trillion dollars was created, it was not "collected".

> which was witty a few decades ago and sounds just ignorant today.

Countries that turn to socialism are always running massive deficits paid for with inflation. American states and cities that lean into socialism are all having major problems with running out of money and raising taxes.

>For good reason. Socialism's track record is pretty bad. They're always running out of other peoples' money.

Define socialism. Isn't the collectively owned road outside your property essentially socialism? Would that work better if it were privately owned?

The Wrights were about 5 years ahead of their time. The Wrights went about it as an R+D project and calculated what the design must be, while the other developers were doing seat-of-the-pants designs which worked about as expected.

Except we don't do wing warping anymore, or take many design cues from the wrights at all.

Hard to say they were ahead when they were in an evolutionary dead end.

Wright accomplishments that were crucial to making a working airplane:

1. First propeller theory, which got them a propeller that was 90% efficient rather than the 50% efficiency of contemporary propellers. The theory has only been slightly improved today.

2. First 3 axis control system, copied by everyone else. Yes, ailerons are a better system, but it's the same idea.

3. First aviation engine with a power/weight ration double anyone else's.

4. First research and development project where the problems of flight were identified and then prototypes developed to solve each of the problems.

5. Extensive use of a wind tunnel to determine the optimal cross-section shape of the wing.

6. Use of calculations to determine the size and lift of the wing, and how much power was needed from the engine.

All airplane designs trace their lineage back to the 1903 Flyer, not anybody else's airplane.

Of course you shouldn't be able to patent an entire discipline! I can't comprehend your point of view here.

And a million people had the idea of "controlling a vehicle in the air". Patents aren't for vague ideas, they're for specific mechanisms.

> I can't comprehend your point of view here

It isn't their pov. 90% of computing patents are basically 'X on a computer'

Eg the Amazon 1 click buy patent

Sure, things within the discipline of computing can be patented, but imagine if somebody just patented the entire discipline of computing.

Somehow 1 click buy doesn't quite feel like it's in the same category as humanity conquering the skies.

They didn't patent the equivalent, the entire discipline of flying. They patented "angular relations of the lateral margins of the aeroplanes may be varied in opposite directions with respect to the normal planes of said aeroplanes"

On my part, I'm not entirely sure what a lateral margin is, so I just answered somat's question which is about the entire discipline of controlling a plane.

I don't think patent law should be concerned with what inventors "deserve" in some moral sense. I think their purpose should be socially practical.

The socially practical effect of working patent law is that it incentivizes inventors to publicly document their inventions by offering limited exclusive rights to the invention. To that end, an overly broad claim to hypothetical inventions which are not actually documented in the patent is detrimental and instead stifles innovation.

> I don't think patent law should be concerned with what inventors "deserve" in some moral sense.

"Deserve" in itself is a meaningless word, a tribal signal. It's interesting to figure out what different people actually mean by "deserve" when they say it (followed the procedure, fulfilled the agreement, expended a sufficient amount of effort, suffered, were responsible in some way for its existence, is alive, has not taken from others, is loved) but there's nothing really there to base anything on. It's a political word.

The real world equivalent is "is entitled to."

edit: it doesn't help that the philosophical area that focuses on what people "deserve" is called "desert." It's one of the cases where where English sorely needs Spanish-style accent markers. "Desért."

What someone "is entitled to" is of course also largely a political phenomenon, a social construct. Just like the idea of what someone deserves it supposes a principle according to which that can be said. For example, ideas of what people deserve according to moral principles often precede legal principles that entitle them to that. But it is only in terms of those moral principles that someone can deserve that, and in terms of those legal principles that someone can be entitled to it.

It's a false dichotomy you must have exclusive rights to be profitable. What about the claim that you are "the first and the original X"?

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