[pembrook]

In some narrow cases I see the value in patents motivating financial investment in original research. But most of the time this does not apply.

Optical pulse oximeters are an obvious incremental thing, and with zero knowledge of the space I don’t think it’s crazy to believe these would have come into existence on the same time frame with or without the existence of patents.

Virtually everything humans create or “discover” is an inevitability. We’re all just memetic LLMs, remixing stuff with mildly differing levels of variance. Originality is quaint pre-industrial human myth.

That said, Apple would have absolutely done the same thing if they had the patent. So I have zero sympathy for either party.

Don’t hate the player, hate the “artificially granted ownership over progress” game.

[kelnos]

> with zero knowledge of the space...

While I don't think we should give courts and government-like agencies no scrutiny, I think I'm probably going to put greater weight on the ITC's decision than a random person on the internet who admits they have zero knowledge of the technology in question.

[jojobas]

>Virtually everything humans create or “discover” is an inevitability.

Even though it's inevitable that someone will invest a lot of time to get us better TFT displays in form of IPS, it's very much favorable that he can reap some reward for it.

It's a bit of a gamble and is therefore supplanted by the trade secret and research grant systems, still it's a useful incentive to do cool stuff.

[adrian_b]

The main problem is not that patents exist.

Especially in the distant past, there have been many patents that were really valuable and their inventors deserved to be rewarded.

The main problem is that today patents are granted far too easily. Most patents contain in their claims only things that any competent professional could discover independently after a few hours of thinking about how to solve a problem.

Other claims are for methods that have been known for a long time, but they were not applied for various reasons, e.g. of cost or efficiency, to the applications described in the patent. Then some unrelated technological progress happened, which may not be mentioned at all in the patent, which suddenly enabled the extension of the application domain of the old method, and then someone quickly filed a patent for the new combination of old methods.

Other claims are far too general and cover all the ways that everyone could list about how to solve a problem, even if most of them are not practical at present and the inventor would not be able to demonstrate any functional implementation, but they are inserted in the patent claims for the case that someone will discover in the future a suitable technology, when it will become possible to claim that it infringes the patent.

Many patents are just reformulations of much older patents, from decades ago, perhaps filed in other countries, but they use such an obfuscated language that it is difficult to determine that in fact the different patents claim the same things.

I have read many patents, but the most recent they are, the less likely it is to find in them anything that I consider innovative or that would justify in any way to consider the patent as valid.

Nevertheless, few individuals or companies would be able to bear the expenses and risks of trying to invalidate patents, so there are many examples when inferior technologies have been used for decades in order to circumvent bogus patents.

Moreover, the days when most patent owners used the patents as a direct source of revenue are long in the past. Today few patent owners are willing to license them at fair and non-discriminatory prices. Most use the patents only as a means to prevent competition.

[jojobas]

>The main problem is that today patents are granted far too easily.

Currently in the US, for better or worse, actual scrutiny happens when you try to claim infringement, not at application.

>Other claims are far too general and cover all the ways that everyone could list about how to solve a problem,

This is covered by the non-obvious clause.

>Today few patent owners are willing to license them at fair and non-discriminatory prices.

Plain wrong.

[mort96]

There is no "he" who will reap the reward. The reward all goes to the share holders and executives of the company which ends up owning the patent, not the individual or individuals who comes up with the thing which can be patented.

[jojobas]

The researcher individuals will be paid their salary and their jobs' existence depends solely on ability of the shareholders to protect their investment.

[mort96]

Exactly, and that's my point! The individual who does the invention gets a normal salary which they would've gotten anywhere doing anything (or, at best, a slightly higher salary than others doing similar work), and the people who reap the reward are the shareholders and executives.

[jojobas]

That's worse an understanding of economics than I'd expect here. The fact that fruit of research and development is protected investment creates research jobs. Without patent protection, shareholders and executives would hire fewer people and overall progress would be slower.

[DiggyJohnson]

But if none of the workers produce innovative work that the firm can patent, then the firm might fail and

> the individual who does the invention gets a normal salary which they would've gotten anywhere doing anything

may no longer be true.

[mort96]

Frankly, I have no idea what your point is. Clearly patents aren't enriching the inventor of the thing being patented, and that's that.

[Bouncingsoul1]

Your LLMs need a reward function -> patents. You are welcome

[jojobas]

1) Train an LLM to be a patent judge (should be easy enough).

2) Train another LLM to throw patents at the first LLM and see what sticks.

3) Profit.

[prng2021]

“We’re all just memetic LLMs, remixing stuff with mildly differing levels of variance.”

Einstein upended every other human beings notion of space and time. Copernicus also proposed something preposterous for his time. Would you say they just remixed stuff with mild variance?

[adrian_b]

Copernicus has only revived a theory first proposed millennia before him (in Ancient Greece), but initially rejected for insufficient evidence. Even for Copernicus, his theory was based more on faith than on evidence, because it became possible to measure the stellar parallaxes only much later.

When Einstein published his theory of Special Relativity, it did not contain any fact or formula that had not already existed previously in the works of Lorentz, Poincaré and many others. It was just a new and original point of view about which is the meaning of those known relationships (i.e. that it is the speed of light which is constant in all reference systems, while other quantities are variable, instead of making other choices about which quantities are constant and which are variable).

His contribution is actually very similar with that of Copernicus, who also did not provide any new fact or relationship, but just a new choice about which position should be considered constant, Sun's or Earth's. Both changes were very small compared with the existing knowledge, but they were very important for enabling further progress.

Every progress is really incremental and it adds very little over the existing body of knowledge, even if the addition is essential for any further progress and for improving the practical applications.

[LadyCailin]

This might be confirmation bias to a degree, because of something called “the adjacent possible”. That is, that ideas that are too far ahead of their time, simply don’t catch on, and so no one has ever heard of them. However, the individuals inventing these things would be extraordinary individuals, I would argue. Clive Sinclair might be one example of this.

[prng2021]

What’s stopping you from making an incremental contribution like Einstein and earning yourself a Nobel like he did?

[cma]

I don't think we are LLMs, but was it a coincidence something like ricci calculus had just been developed?

[adrian_b]

The Ricci calculus has influenced Einstein only more than a decade later, in the development of the General Relativity (1917), for which tensor calculus was indispensable.

It had no influence on the theory of Special Relativity (1905).

Einstein is the one who changed the meaning of the word "tensor" to the meaning used today in most cases, when tensor means a general multi-dimensional quantity. I could not find any information about the reason why Einstein has chosen to make this change in terminology.

Before Einstein, "tensor" (a term introduced by Hamilton) was applied only to symmetric matrices (because general matrices can be decomposed into "versors", i.e. rotation matrices that rotate vectors and a "tensor", i.e. a symmetric matrix that stretches vectors).

While Ricci has invented the concept of tensor, he has not used the word "tensor". Nevertheless, because Einstein's theory had become extremely fashionable at the end of WWI, when Ricci's work has been translated and published in USA, the American editor has introduced the word "tensor" everywhere in the book and they added on the covers that this is the book needed to understand Einstein's tensor theory, in order to promote the sales of the book.

Thus, Ricci's calculus became known as tensor calculus, first in USA, then everywhere.

[cma]

He didn't specify general vs. special but there were lots of developments leading to special relativity too: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_special_relativit...

[adrian_b]

Those developments had no relationship whatsoever with the Ricci calculus that had been published a few years before, which was my point.

When the General Relativity was developed in 1917, the Ricci calculus was no longer recent, but it was 17 years old.

Therefore what the OP supposed, that there was an immediate causal relationship between these lines of work, is not true.

[cma]

I wasn't saying Ricci calculus was related to special relativity discovery. OP didn't say whether talking about special or general relativity.

17 years old I think is quite recent given the gap between special and general (would you say no immediate connection between them because of the length of that gap?), and there were presumably other pieces involved.