this post was submitted on 20 May 2026
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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.
The solution to this is supposed to be the time limit: if your invention builds on a very recent invention, you may have to get permission from that inventor, but older inventions become common property and can be freely built upon. If that time limit gets too long, which it absolutely has, then that can end up causing more harm than good.
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.
Except 99% of the time, the company bankrupts the person who invented it (or threatens to) and then buys it out from under them through financial coersion and then make millions or billions in profit while giving the person who spent years or decades of effort developing it less than 1% of its worth.
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.
Normal citizens!? The cost of patent litigation can range from $2,000,000 to $4,000,000 on average per side.
I am sorry, but I have yet to meet a normal citizen that can afford a cost like this.