this post was submitted on 20 May 2026
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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.
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.
Patents are supposed to be pretty specific and open to alternative implementations that don't infringe, but the USPTO has made some pretty awful decisions, especially around early home computers.
That’s kind of my point.
If a system keeps getting abused to grant monopolies on absurdly broad concepts, maybe the problem isn’t just bad decisions, maybe the incentives themselves are broken.
And in practice, litigation costs alone already scare away competitors long before courts decide anything.
I'd call that a failure of capitalism, not of patents specifically. Any system stops working if you change the rules enough, and it was capitalism that allowed those rule changes.