[Tenobrus]

Under a different system that doesn't incentivize holding back global progress for small amounts of individual enrichment.

There's a reason Linux and GNU utilities are so massively widely used, and overall they've probably provided billions in economic value. They do that freely, for any human to use, and in fact that's part of their main value proposition. Both were born out of the legal nightmare that was UNIX at the time.

How should he get paid for this? In a very-ideal world, people and corporations that used his idea and had spare capital would voluntarily give him donations. In a better-than-this world, governments (or some other entity) would pay bounties to inventories out of a pool of tax money, based on both perceived usefulness of the invention and how widespread its use came to be.

[Chaebixi]

> Under a different system that doesn't incentivize holding back global progress for small amounts of individual enrichment.

Patents were explicitly created to avoid, "incentivize holding back global progress for small amounts of individual enrichment." The other realistic alternative is keeping the invention a trade secret, which is much worse for progress.

> How should he get paid for this? In a very-ideal world, people and corporations that used his idea and had spare capital would voluntarily give him donations.

That sounds exactly like how patents work except with no protections for the inventor. With a patents, the corporations that use the idea do give the inventor donations called license fees, but they can't screw him over and pay him less than he's worth (which they would otherwise do so they can keep the profits for themselves).

Basically, it sounds like you're proposing worse, more awkward systems because you irrationally hate the concept of patents for some reason.

[indubitable]

A few things in no particular order.

1 - It's not holding back anything. If this invention has any merit, it will be licensed and society at large will benefit from it.

2 - Incentive. If this inventor could not make a guaranteed profit from this idea, I imagine he could have found more interesting ways to spend his time than playing with floating point numeric representations. It's not like he stumbled upon this on the road and then hid it from society. He set out to create things like this as a means of sustaining himself and improving the world at the same time.

3 - The reason markets are useful is because they work phenomenally well at determining value. As we swapped to currency operated markets over barter, nobody ruled a chicken was worth 3 coins, a pig 10, and a cow 25. Instead market forces decided, and tend to do better than any other means of measuring value. Donations, let alone bureaucracy, are extremely poor substitutes in determining the value of anything. Their ideal would be to approach market force level efficiency. This isn't to say markets are flawless, but rather they're a whole let less flawed than any alternative.

[dfox]

Motivation for patent system is that it incentivizes inventors to publish they inventions in exchange for time-limited exclusivity on it, which is certainly better for progress than inventions that are unpublished trade secrets.

Issue with patent system is that it's real implementations are gameable, not with the idea itself.

[api]

I agree with the sentiment but unfortunately we've never found a way to implement real socialism without creating a massive permanent welfare underclass that does nothing and a sclerotic self-serving bureaucracy to support them.

Most people are not little philosopher kings who work to advance a grand vision of life's unfolding in the universe. Most people just want to do the minimum to get by until they can get their next dose of entertainment. I hate to be such a cynic, but I have eyes.

Social democracy (Europe, USA to a lesser extent) is a hybrid that basically works but you still have to make money in that system.

[kbenson]

> Social democracy (Europe, USA to a lesser extent) is a hybrid that basically works but you still have to make money in that system.

Whether it's capitalism with a large dose of socialism of socialism or socialism with a large dose of capitalism, neither extreme seems to work as well as approaches that adopt portions of both.

> Most people are not little philosopher kings who work to advance a grand vision of life's unfolding in the universe. Most people just want to do the minimum to get by until they can get their next dose of entertainment. I hate to be such a cynic, but I have eyes.

I think the only people that actually work to advance understanding of the universe do so for selfish reasons, and we all just get to benefit from the byproduct of their self interest. If I had to guess whether Einstein of Newton did what they did because they wanted every human to be better of, or if it was primarily because that's what they enjoyed doing and they were lucky enough to be in circumstances that allowed them to live doing that (and become famous as well), I know where I'd place my bet.

It's the same for child rearing. There's a sense of happiness and contentment when your children are happy and safe (or at a minimum there's usually uneasiness and dread when your children are unhappy or unsafe), so you try to make that the situation the one that makes you the most comfortable happy. It's an instinctual and emotional response, but doesn't necessarily make sense from a purely rational self-interest point of view.

We aren't saints, we're machines with wacky firmware that imparts interesting and had to evaluate value functions.

[wizzard]

So he should have either hoped that corporations would feel charitable, or submitted himself as a guinea pig to a system that doesn't exist. Got it.

[kbenson]

> Under a different system that doesn't incentivize holding back global progress for small amounts of individual enrichment.

Patents don't hold back global progress any more than capitalism keeps people in poverty. If we went back a few hundred years and impose alternatives, would we be better off today? I doubt it.

The whole point of the patent system is to foster innovation, and free exchange of ideas. Without the patent system, people are incentivized to keep their inventions secret, and hide how they work, but patents require publishing the details. Some companies don't patent some things just so they can keep it secret.

The problem with the patent system is not the concept of patents, but what they've been allowed to apply to and how long the terms have increased.

Him patenting the idea meanshe has control over his options. It also prevents another entity, such as Intel or AMD discovering it and patenting it. If he wants, he can make it free to use for non-profiting or open source entities.

Edit: The capitalism / poverty comparison is meant to infer communism, as the alternative to a competition and financially motivated system. I don't think it's contentious to say capitalism ended up being the better system for getting people's standard of living raised, even is communism sounds good on paper. I don't think the relation to the patent system in comparison to some ideal sounding solution where people get some money somehow for giving their ideas to the world immediately is all that strained.

[JackFr]

> The whole point of the patent system is to foster innovation

And if it seems like the patent system is being gamed to hinder innovation (not really in this case, but yes absolutely in the case of pharma) it should be revisited. Intellectual property laws are based in pragmatism, not natural law. If the costs begin to outweigh the benefits, they should be changed.

[Chaebixi]

There are areas of the patent system that are legitimately in need of reform, but that doesn't mean the underlying concept is not sound. Many people seem to be looking at the areas where reform is needed and erroneously concluding that the whole thing needs to be burned down. That's a shame, since the core idea of patents seems like a very good trade-off to me.

[Spivak]

You can hate the patent system all you want but this specific case, assuming that his invention works, is a case where patents are being used correctly.

[casiotone]

> Patents don't hold back global progress any more than capitalism keeps people in poverty.

Thanks. I was worried I would go the whole day without spitting out my drink.

[Spivak]

Ignoring the weird comparison, he's right. Patents, as bad as the system is, are an improvement on no patents.

[kbenson]

When people start talking about ideal and better-than-idea worlds and voluntary payments or government disbursements, my mind goes to communism. While communism sounds like it provides a better outcome on paper, capitalism (with constraints) has shown it's a much better system for raising the living standard of everyone, even if there is quite a disparity between the lowest and the highest.

Would some ideal-world type situation for patents work? I doubt it. We have patents, and there are some upsides to that system, even if it has been abused recently. I think people have transferred a lot of their anger at the abuses to the concept of patents themselves. Here we have someone that patented something, and people are upset that he did that before knowing how he intends to use the patent. The patent could be free for non-commercial use. It could be free for many things. Or it could be that it's most likely to be used in hardware by a large corporation that prints chips and not individuals, and he'll license it to them and the most anyone will see of it is a few cents added to the production cost of each chip (not that anyone even knows what that is, since retail chip pricing is so crazy).

How we measure a system shouldn't be based on just the biggest successes and biggest problems (but those should be looked at), but on the long track record of what it does and how it performs. In that light, I think capitalism has shown itself a better system in the long run, and I think patents have shown their merit in the long run as well.

[dahauns]

Why going back a few hundred years? Even a few decades ago the idea of patenting mathematics was still mostly considered absurd. Imagine a world where people like e.g. Dijkstra and Lamport patented all their concurrency algorithms. Hoare patented quicksort. And so on.

[kbenson]

It looks to my like it's a process to be carried out in hardware which is patented, and not the mathematics in question. It's a physical apparatus.

Even if it was purely mathematics, I think I would rather have someone patent it if possible and make it freely available than to leave it out and have someone else take a stab at patenting it, have the underfunded patent office fail to realize there is prior art, and grant the patent. Sure, you could effectively fight it, but until the system gets reformed enough to prevent most these abused, that's a lot of wasted resources (and having the patent lets them threaten others with it without actually bringing a case that could invalidate it).

[Chaebixi]

> The problem with the patent system is not the concept of patents, but what they've been allowed to apply to and how long the terms have increased.

Patents aren't copyrights. The term for patents is only about 20 years.

[kbenson]

You're right, I was conflating the two issues somewhat. I do think patent terms should be be somewhat different for different classes of patents, or industries they are used in. If patents for software is to be allowed, I'm not sure why it needs to have a term of more than 3-5 years from issuance. Any industry moving at a similar clip could also benefit from reduced terms. 20 years isn't forever, but depending on industry momentum and advance rate, it ends up retarding innovation instead of helping it.

In any case, I don't think we should immediately vilify someone for using the patent system (and using it as originally intended, IMO), just because we are unhappy with the way it's been abused recently, as I think it has provided us great benefit over it's existence.