💾 Archived View for idiomdrottning.org › trivial-patents captured on 2023-07-10 at 13:54:59. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2023-01-29)
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I opposed and ended a trivial patent once (I found prior art) but the lesson I learned from that is that it’s important to oppose even non-trivial patents. If I identify and stop only the stupid patents, I’m only doing the work of the patent office for them.
In the case of something like “Bionic Reading” (a proprietary system that bolds part of the words) the claimed part is not the implementation, it’s the idea and the research to verify the idea. That’s exactly the difference between patents and copyright. Copyright restricts an implementation (which, for something like code or a movie can be a very non-trivial implementation of a trivial idea. Like, the movie “The Matrix”, the idea is simple (“guy gets chosen to fight in modem land”) but the implementation cost $63 million. Patents restricts an idea (which can be an idea that’s unintuitive and difficult to come up with and verify), but the implementation is like two lines of JS.
It’s patents and patenting as a whole that’s the problem, not just trivial patents.
(I personally would want fewer—maybe half—fixations than they’re using. It’s very frustrating for me to read “bionic reading” text because it forces me to fixate much more than I otherwise would. It feels like getting a slap after every word.)