this post was submitted on 20 May 2026
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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.
Potato potato, the point still stands: It's impossible to come up with a new, say, car engine design without centuries' worth of thermodynamics and assorted physics, millennia's worth of metallurgy and the labor of hundreds if not thousands of people providing the food, water, electricity, manufactured goods, etc to make the act of innovation possible, and all those people have a claim to a piece of the pie.
You don't patent the thermodynamics, or even the concept of a car engine. You would patent the specific schematics, which, if you engineered in an original way, then you should own the rights to it for a period of time.
Everyone who labored to provide food, housing, utilities, etc. while you worked on it already got their piece of the pie when they accepted the wages they agreed to work for or the price they set for the goods. (The unfairness of wage labor is a separate issue to be addressed separately; it has nothing to do with IP laws, and it's the employers who are on the hook to compensate them more fairly, not the end consumer).
Anything else and suddenly you owe every grocer, farmer, and fieldworker a royalty for every dollar you make at your job; which you can clearly see is a foolish idea. You buy the fucking food and you eat it; it's yours, and whatever you decide to do with the energy it provides is no business of the people you bought it from.
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.
If you write a book and pour your heart and soul into it, then you self-publish and it catches on, and some douchebag dropshipper republished it on CreateSpace and sells it on Amazon with Print-on-Demand, and sells a million copies while your sales of your own book drop off to nothing, you'd be upset, wouldn't you? Don't you think you deserve at least some legal protection?
When an idea becomes a part of humanity's shared intellectual heritage, it shouldn't be owned by anyone. Books take 90 years to enter the public domain, so generally the authors are dead by then. But nobody can patent "gears," "screws," or "levers" as concepts, because they've simply been around so long.
But if someone draws a specific schematic with precise dimensions, and arrays them in a specific way to achieve a result, then that's a unique invention that they should have the rights to for maybe 5-10 years.
It should be loose enough that someone else can draw a different schematic inspired by that one that achieves something similar, but not simply copy-pasting the same schematic.
The fact that the rich get away with intellectual property theft while hounding the poor for anything close to a trademark violation is an injustice and a symptom of financial oligarchy, but that's less to do with IP laws per se and more to do with governments skewing everything in favor of the rich.