391
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[-] Buffalox@lemmy.world 106 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

The original idea with patents is to help protect small inventors from being run over by bigger corporations.
But the result is more often the opposite, where small inventors that have a genuinely profitable novel product, is quickly forced to bankruptcy by frivolous patent suits, even when the new product is patented, and when bankrupt bought for peanuts by the bigger corp.

The other main basis for patents is that the technology should not be lost, in case of the inventors death.
But the way tech works today, that is no-longer relevant.

5 year patent would absolutely be better than what we have IMO.

[-] henfredemars@infosec.pub 57 points 1 month ago

As someone who was awarded several patents, these things were not made to be a source of infinite money forever!

Up there with our copyright law it’s a system that has been horribly abused to the benefit of super powerful corporations that run everything.

[-] Buffalox@lemmy.world 39 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

I have a friend who works for the city and invented a brilliant system to remove weed from pebble driveways, without using weed killers. They wrote an article in the local paper, and he was even awarded by the mayor.

Several people recommended to him to patent his system, and he contacted a patent lawyer to do just that.
The lawyer praised his idea, and stated he could make the paperwork to get the patent, for the small fee of some insane amount.
Luckily he pulled out, and did not go forward.

It turns out that his idea was already in production in Germany. The money to the patent lawyer would have been a complete waste.

The moral of the story is, that the only sure winners on patents, are the lawyers.

Edit PS:
Another story, a guy had some patents he found out were being used by a really big company.
He contacted the company to make an agreement on the use of his patents, and the response he got back was basically: "Sue us".
Those big companies have lawyers on their pay role, patent cases are insanely expensive, in part because patent lawyers are among the most expensive, and it's near impossible to predict the outcome of a case. His chances of even affording the case were slim, and the chance of winning even if he was obviously right were even slimmer. Because the big company will just hire "experts" to claim non violation. And the little guy can't afford to match it.

So again the patents didn't help the little guy.

[-] henfredemars@infosec.pub 21 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

That’s really cool! My invention was a means of accelerated processing for images that makes it cheaper to produce what used to be dedicated color processing chips for digital cameras. While these are no longer used today, it did find some applications. At this point there’s a few libraries out there implementing some of it as open source with my explicit permission in the hopes they might find some use in the future and contribute to society that way.

[-] Buffalox@lemmy.world 7 points 1 month ago

Cool, digital photography is an area that has had insane development IMO.
I'm absolutely flabbergasted by the digital photography capabilities of modern phones. high res, image stabilization, and of course color mapping/filtering.
The processing power needed is insane. 4K movies are 8 megapixel at 3 colors 30 fps, and it's 750 million sub pixels, that need to be processed per second, and we do that on a cheap tiny handheld device! The better ones can handle 8K and that's 3 Billion sub pixels per second!

It's impressive that you have been part of it. 👍 😎

load more comments (2 replies)
load more comments (2 replies)
load more comments (6 replies)
this post was submitted on 05 Oct 2024
391 points (99.2% liked)

Technology

59210 readers
2519 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS