Patents

Although I'd personally prefer to abolish patents and disband the patent office completely, this may not go over well with the public at first.

OFC it won't ,at first
we need to talk to the public and teach them about it
i think we should debate our ideal before talking about implementation issues

my idea is to abolish any monopoly on ideas. artists can and should go back to using a live-on-commission model. life as an artist was never easy. before that damned queen gave the power of art to the publishers, artists who had talent and skill worked for popes, monarchs and other wealthy patrons to create beautiful and lasting contributions to society and culture. we can and should go back to that. there is nothing wrong with crowdfunding studios.

*ideal

crowdfunding studios, bands or individual artists, musicians, authors, and digital artists is fine. regarding patents, the same goes for inventors, engineers and architects. bridges should not be commissioned by the state, but commissioned by the community in a fluid crowdfunded and the collective decision to construct it.

I don't agree with that. By making artists indebted to their commissioners, you restrict their art. How do you define a monoply on an idea?

@nicholasdesalvio The idea of abolishing patents is actually VERY popular in engineering circles. You'd have a very hard time finding any engineer who doesn't think some variation of "Patents are destroying my field, but I guess they're fine for everyone else." The key is to get all the engineers to talk to each other and realize that the only people who like patents are patent lawyers.

Yeah, I Personally feel that getting rid of them is good. We just need to create a profit incentive for the PHARMS industry (Which I hate to do, but feel its needed to justify the extremely large amounts of money that is required for R&D)

I also think we need a system that generally supports more innovation as well... but thats a different discussion for a different day.

I think that is a discussion for today Nick :P

If we are going to argue for abolishing the present system then we should have some idea of what would come after we are successful. That is just responsible.

I think there needs to be some way of protecting creators from poaching. Think Edison and Tesla. No one should have their work plagiarized or stolen.

What...this...discussion...you can't be serious.

@amandajohnson We do have an idea of what happens after we abolish patents. Historical evidence shows that a lack of a patent system is far better for innovation.

Preventing plagiarism is much more important for creative works (which are handled by copyright) than it is for technology. People care a lot less about who invented what, and more about whether or not it works. We REALLY shouldn't be legally encouraging the kind of cult of personality that Steve Jobs built around himself, for example.

I think encouraging open source culture would do a much better job of protecting inventors from being exploited than any kind of patent system.

@zacqaryadamgreen Okay, I can agree to that.