Hacker News Reader

Comment by double0jimb0 | Hacker News Reader

Such a ridiculous take. Of course a room full of engineers can probably come up with a solution.

But what got those engineers in the same room in the first place?

What got them in the same room in the first place was them being the only group of people (most likely) working on a specific piece of enabling technology that they believed would be rewarded by the market and adoption AND they needed to make a living in the mean time (getting paid to do that work.)

A patent is the best thing we’ve collectively come up with to allow said group / company to invest the time and money in advance to making that technology and wants to risk/trade 20 future years to collect profit on the work they do now.

If you don’t like the game, get better at it.

View on HN

But what got those engineers in the same room in the first place?

If whoever happens to need the technology first is almost certain to invent it, it's not worth $6B. The idea behind patents is supposed to be disclosing things that people wouldn't otherwise come up with on their own.

Not saying that's true here, but it's certainly true for a lot of patents. (Variable-speed windshield wipers deserved a government-enforced monopoly? Really?)

This is basically my point. I don't think there's $6 billion of value in those engineers coming up with this patent before Apple came up with the same solution years later. There is some value to it, and I don't think we need a patent-troll-enabling ecosystem to still have economic incentive for people to engineer these solutions simply because they're useful to a profitable product, and not just because they hope to later sue someone for patent infringement years later.

> But what got those engineers in the same room in the first place?

The interest in a shared problem and the passion to solve it?

> A patent is the best thing we’ve collectively come up with

I think that’s a bold claim in the face of the numerous contributions from e.g. universities, open source communities, single-person projects, etc that have pushed the world forward. We simply do not know a world free of the oppression of patents, the institution sustains itself.

> If you don’t like the game, get better at it.

I don’t think people will be playing this game much longer in the face of generative AI, unless ofc the ruling classes succeed in locking down access to that tech, gobally.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com