this post was submitted on 20 May 2026
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patents should not exist
The original idea behind them had some merit: in exchange for showing everyone else exactly how to do a cool new thing, you got to temporarily be the only one to profit from it. They've devolved into parenting general ideas (see the shopping cart patent) and fucking over anyone who finds a way to make the idea work, though.
The key is "temporarily" though. Even in the 18th century and prior when technology evolved at the pace of a snail on sedatives that meant 5, maybe 10, at most 15 years.
Then in the 90s the world's international cartel of IP rights got together and decided they should make it 20 years everywhere, just so corporations can monopolize anything they make for the entire the duration of its usefulness. With the speed of progress today I'd be surprised if most aren't obsolete before they become available to the general public. 3D printing is only a thing now because Stratasys was hoarding the FDM patent since the fucking 90s.
Shit needs to go back down to 5 years again.
I disagree, if I spend time and money to figure out how to solve a problem efficiently, why shouldn't I get to profit from that idea?
The above only applies to hardware patents, software patents however should not extist.
Regardless, if a company are not actively using a patent, as in a product themselves or through licensing, for X years, then the patent should be void.
I’m not anti-profit. I’m anti state-granted monopoly.
If you invented it first, you already have advantages: expertise, brand, speed, know-how, first-mover position, customer trust. Profit should come from executing better, not from getting the state to forbid competitors from improving on your idea.
Patents are not capitalism; they are government-enforced market exclusion.
It's a bandaid fix though. Abolishing capitalism so that we could focus on innovation without needing to monetise it in order to eat is a better idea.
Of course it's work finding solutions to problems and you should be able to live off your work. And in capitalism, a patent sometimes is the only option to do so.
However, patents and other forms of "intellectual property" are absolutely illogical and amoral. Nobody ever made a completely new thing. Every innovation builds on so much knowledge accumulated by so many people that came before. It's absolutely nonsensical that an advancement that's 99 % an achievement of humanity and 1 % of a single person should belong to that single person.
I disagree, patents makes sense for normal citizens, it gives them a legal framework to fight against a company just taking the invention from them without compensation.
As for the 99% vs 1% contribution, remember that it is usually the last 1% of a project that consumes the most time.
That's a weak argument because everything used by normal citizens is, in practice, always used by the big corpos against the normal citizens in much greater quantity and with much more force.
Now that I think of it, it's no argument at all because I already admitted, that under capitalism, you might not have another choice to get paid for your work. That still doesn't make it morally good or logically sound.
I find it interesting that you draw the line at software, as if it doesn’t require time and money to create software solutions.
If it matters, I’m of the opinion that patents shouldn’t exist period. Capitalism loves to brag about encouraging competition and how much it benefits consumers, when in reality patents are super anticompetitive. An idea is one thing, executing the idea well is another. If I “take” your idea and execute it better than you, there shouldn’t be legislation stopping me
THANK YOU. Exactly. Competition is supposed to decide who wins, not the state. If your invention is genuinely great, you should dominate because you innovate faster, manufacture better, support customers better, reduce costs better, and improve continuously, not because the government threatens competitors for 20 years.
Imagine you are an inventor and come up with a brilliant new thing, and start a business to sell it. You even bring in people to help manufacture and make them a co-op. Doing everything ethically right. Selling a quality product that people want.
Then a multinational conglomerate sees it is selling well and they use their immense resources to scale up production, produce and sell it for half the price you can.
You and your co-op go out of business and megacorps shareholders pocket even more dividends.
Thats why patents should exist in a capitalist hellscape.
That argument proves the problem is scale and market power, not lack of patents.
Giving everyone a legal weapon sounds fair in theory, but in practice the biggest companies have the best lawyers, the biggest patent portfolios, and the most money to litigate. Patents often become a moat for incumbents, not a shield for small inventors.
A pro-market answer would be: reduce barriers to entry, punish fraud, enforce contracts, maybe protect trade secrets narrowly, but don’t ban competitors from building better versions.
I still think the patents need limitations.
1 year limit if not actively being used for a product in production.
10yr total limit.
Something like a video game mechanic should be limited to 2 years from first use.
Patents should be a limited way to protect and support innovation. Patent hoarding needs to be stopped.
Drug patents should have same limitations unless its something the government deems too critical, and then the company should be reimbursed for their research costs and the patent killed.
Why should you exclusively get to profit from that idea? In any case all innovation stands on the shoulders of giants supported by society at large. The idea of owning an idea in the first place is absurd, but setting that aside if someone will assert exclusive rights to an idea they should first repay society for all its indirect contributions to that idea, from past innovators to the workers whose labor makes it all possible. Or course this is impossible, meaning owning an idea automatically becomes absurd. And this is before we get to how pretty much all parents are based on publicly funded research. Government-granted monopolies should stay in the 19th century.
Because it is not really the idea specifically that you patent, you patent a method of making an idea work.
That honestly makes patents even less justifiable.
You’re not protecting a finished product or a brand reputation, you’re protecting a method, meaning you’re legally blocking alternative implementations around a problem space.
That’s exactly the kind of artificial restriction that slows competition and incremental innovation.
Potato potato, the point still stands: It's impossible to come up with a new, say, car engine design without centuries' worth of thermodynamics and assorted physics, millennia's worth of metallurgy and the labor of hundreds if not thousands of people providing the food, water, electricity, manufactured goods, etc to make the act of innovation possible, and all those people have a claim to a piece of the pie.
Software patents don't exist in the real world. It's just those dumb Americans living in their fantasy world who do it. Dumb fucks