I'm having a hard time even grappling with how that could be true?
I always assumed that intellectual property was invented in order to protect against a specific use case:
If researching a new product is extremely cost intensive. But once a product is invented, it is easy to reverse engineer how the product works. Then the first firm will need intellectual property to put in the initial cost, otherwise they will not do so, as they know they will not have enough time to recoup their costs in the market before a competitor moves in with a copy-cat product without having to paid the initial costs.
There are two things to tackle here which I’m keen not to mix up as I think their epistemological properties are quite different:
1) [the stronger one] while the scenario/narrative is a compelling one (or maybe it just feels compelling as I’ve heard it so many times), if it doesn’t have experimental/data backing I have to abandon it.
2) [the weaker one, as it replaces a narrative with another narrative within a complex system] I’ll only give the highlights as the arguments are a lot more eloquently laid out in the book; part of it is comparing the force of “many inventor nodes building on top of many invention nodes” vs “inventor nodes (with more investment individually?) building on top of fewer invention nodes”, part of it is the game theory effect of companies collectively investing less (proportionally) in R&D as the ROI from lawyers under this regime has more power, part of it was that actually, the reverse-engineering-simplicity story was too overblown and that actually the friction + domain knowledge has a stronger effect than people think (they published a paper on this). There were others, but it’s been a while now!
In many research-intensive products go-to-market costs are bigger than the cost of actual invention. You buy a pharma startup for a few million for their patents, then spend tens of millions on certification, trials and manufacturing pipelines. Your competitors would spend most of that too on the same markets.
Also, true inventions are rare. A lot of stuff that is being patented is just effort spent, that a lot of people could reproduce (and routinely reproduce, then hit the patent and spend more time to find a workaround).
This sounds like it is working as intended. The patent comes early in the process to protect all the commercialization investment. Patents are intended to be filed early in the process, and they gain value as the invention proves its worth. Note also that you can patent a mining claim before pulling a single precious gem or mineral out of the ground.
Well, the way you describe it, they protect investors, not inventors. Investors do not need protection. Money are abundant, market can solve the commercialization part efficiently.
Indeed. Patents incentivize investment in R&D. There is an argument to be made that the scope of patentable inventions should be more limited, in particular preventing trivial patents that didn’t require substantial R&D, and maybe also that patents shouldn’t last as long.
But doing away completely with patents would certainly stifle companies’ willingness to invest in R&D. They’d rather wait for someone else to invent something they can copy.
In real life, although the amount of incentive is different in different industries; and if one's main experience is in an industry where the amount of incentive is low, it's easy to imagine it's the same everywhere
The study could have revealed that industries without patent protection evolve to have better trade secret security, effectively leveling the benefits of patents.
Literally any product you send to the consumer can be reverse-engineered at comparatively low cost. The world doesn’t just revolve around server-side software.
Reverse engineering may be easy for really simple inventions, but quickly becomes so hard you may as well invent the thing from scratch. Look at USSR's domestic chip production. At one point they succeeded in reverse-engineering chips like Intel's 8086, VAX etc., but chip design very quickly became so complex reverse-engineering the entire chip became impossible. I would say if an invention can be easily reverse-engineered, then it is a simple foundational idea that should not be patented, and if it is truly innovative, then it cannot be reverse-engineered easily and doesn't need patent protections.
Then there is the fact that when something is patented, that has a chilling effect on competition, making the market less efficient.
There are also a lot of really silly patents that end up benefitting no-one, not even their inventor, but only result in needless litigation. The recent lawsuit between Nintendo and PocketPair comes to mind.
While there are cases in which patent law can help individual people profit from their invention, once all consequences are tallied, the overall effect of patent law on society appears to be negative.
Trump released Iran's frozen assets, in return for them opening the straight and thereby dropping oil prices before the midterm elections.
Reminder, the reason Trump hated the Obama deal was because he construed it as paying Iran not to develop nuclear weapons. Obama was paying Iran with the money from Iran's frozen assets. Trump's deal gives them that money, and has no nuclear agreement.
He didn't hate the Obama deal, he hated Obama therefore everything he does has to be criticized and torn down. If that deal had Iran paying the US, Trump would have said the color of the money was no good. And his supporters would eat it up.
According to the NY times, its a 60 day ceasefire on all fronts, and a return to pre-war status on issues like the (blockade, tolls, nuclear program, sanctions) starting this coming Friday. Also on Friday, a new round of negotiations will begin to discuss these issues.
So basically, both sides agreed to go back to the pre-war status quo for 60 days while negotiations continue.
Except one thing so far, apparently Trump has agreed to unfreeze Iranian financial assets.
Remember: the reason Trump said Obama's nuclear agreement was terrible was because Obama was "paying the Iranians to not develop nuclear weapons". What Obama did, was pay them out of these frozen assets. Which trump just gave them back for free, and without a nuclear deal.
If the business has a physical presence somewhere, it's not hard. In California, you can get an order to the Sheriff for a "till tap" or an "8 hour keeper". A till tap means a sheriff's deputy or two show up and take the money out of the cash register. A "keeper" means they stand next to the cashier all day and take in money as customers pay. There are fees for this, a few hundred dollars, and they're added to the judgement, so the creditor doesn't end up paying.
The keeper can accept cash and checks, but not credit or debit cards.[1]
So, while the keeper is present, the business cannot accept card payments.
This disrupts most businesses so badly that they desperately scramble to come up with cash
to pay their debt.[2] It gets the message across to management very effectively.
“Court judgments are not self-enforcing. Solvent or honest debtors will want to pay soon after judgment is entered. A judgment will show up on credit reports and will be a matter of public record. This will be a problem for any judgment debtor attempting to borrow money. Most banks will require any unsatisfied judgments to be paid before they will lend new money. …
If the judgment debtor has only personal property and no real estate, the situation is very different. Personal property depreciates with time, can be damaged and can be easily hidden. Real estate is not going anywhere. One of two things will eventually happen with a judgment lien on real estate. If the debtor is financially viable, he will eventually have to pay off the judgment lien in order to sell or refinance the property. One day, the telephone will ring and someone will want to know where to send the check.”
In some places you can show up with a police escort and just start taking their stuff until the estimated value is enough to settle your debt. i.e. you can foreclose on them.
You can't do this physically do this yourself in the UK (AFAIK at least), but I've heard of people taking businesses to the small claims court in the UK, getting a default judgment because the company didn't bother showing up, then when the company refused to pay the settlement, they got the court to freeze their bank accounts and appoint a debt collector to recover the money.
Another enforcement mechanism that may be available is to go back to the court and get an order to transfer the money out of their bank account, then present it to their bank and they will do it.
Assume that all the avenues a company has to enforce debts against you, you also have those avenues to enforce debts against a company. It just usually doesn't happen that way around, in practice.
No. You can actually request those details from them. But that's a very lengthy process.
We got to the point that the other party just didn't show up, and the judge just set a new date multiple times...
The judge could've gone for a bench warrant, where a sheriff picks up the person the day before to make sure they're present... But that also didn't happen.
If there's no physical store, just cross your fingers they pay the judgement
That will really depend on the business. You can absolutely escalate to seizing their assets (including legal fees for the whole process) assuming you can locate them. If they take the stonewalling to the extreme and have a physical location in many (most? all?) US jurisdictions you can show up with the sheriff and a box truck and start physically taking their things as compensation. There's bodycam footage of this if you're curious.
You request the judge to apply a lien on their assets. You take that to their bank and request that it be applied, and the money paid out.
If that doesn't work, you can always go to the police/bailiff with the court order and schedule a date/time for them to go with you to their offices to seize and auction off their stuff.
A friend of mine did this for a shady company that turned out to be a 1 person company, that then dodged the fine basically by not paying and disappering. I don't know the details, but apparently something happened legally where the guy popped back up on the radar a decade later, a parking fine or something? And as a result the cops showed up to his house and started taking his stuff, causing him to actually pay the fine. I don't remember the details, but the point is it can apparently get somewhat crazy on a small size level, apparently.
A plaintiff won a judgment. He asked the judge: “what do I do now?” The judge replied: “well, if you’re reading the paper one day and see ‘defendant wins the Powerball,’ then you know exactly what to do.”
This sounds like the "can't squeeze blood from a stone" principle. If they don't have anything, you can't get it from them. But if they do have something and just won't give it to you, there are other ways to escalate.
Noncompliance with a court order is one of the worst situations to be in, because a court can order almost anything to coerce compliance, including getting your bank to just send the money to the plaintiff, freezing your bank accounts, sending a sheriff to take your assets, or putting you in jail for an unlimited time until you comply - this last one often happens when cryptocurrency is involved so the court can't actually seize it. They'll just jail you until you give it up. I think the longest contempt of court time was 20ish years.
I've heard of people putting a lien on stuff like the employee's desks and chairs and then they surprise pikachu when the sheriff shows up and the assholes that didn't pay it have nowhere to sit. No idea if it's true, but it was convincing.
I remember someone attempting to sue my minor stepdaughter in small claims (which isn't a thing in WA, if you want to sue a minor you have to go to "real" court, but that's another matter).
Everyone all files in for the session and the Judge patiently explains... "we do not do enforcement here, to be very clear. A judgment in small claims means the court agrees you are owed what is owed in the judgment, no more. You can contain the Sheriff's Department, etc., for arranging enforcement of the judgment..."
Sure as shit, first case on the docket is some landlord/tenant dispute. Gets figured out and one of the parties is awarded $1,200... Very next comment out of his mouth, "Where do I go to pick up that check?" Judge, with a sigh, "As I explained twelve minutes ago, small claims court does not do enforcement". "I thought I went up front and picked up my check and then you got the money from him." "No. I am ... unclear ... why you think that would be the case."
I found myself wryly amused by this. Like the court is just cutting checks for every awarded verdict and "oh, we'll figure out how to make the loser pay somehow, but here, you don't need to worry about that, here's your check".
yeah, and this has the advantage of both being deterministic, and only updating things that are actually linked as opposed to also accidentally updating naming collisions
Arguably its only a matter of making lsp features available to the coding agent via tool calls (CLI, MCP) to prevent the model start doing such changes "manually" but rather use the deterministic tools.
Part of why I'm not terribly fond of CLI harnesses, and prefer ones built into editors like zed. They can (but sadly rarely do) access structured information about your codebase, that's more sophisticated than looking for all strings that match
You also have the problem that if the both the ultimate answer to life the universe and everything, and the ultimate question to life the universe and everything, are know at the same time in the same universe. The universe is spontaneously replaced with a slightly more absurd universe to ensure that both the question and answer become meaningless.
To quote the message from the universes creators to its creation “We apologise for the inconvenience”. Does seem to sum up Douglas Adam’s views on absurdity of life.
I see this sentiment repeated so often, and its so surprising to me that people have this train of thought.
If our society was organized around the needs of workers, and existed to help workers compete at their crafts (somehow), then this would make sense.
But it isn't. Every one of our jobs exists as a contract that was initially offered by an owner of capital, and created in order to make that person more money.
As such, ownership is literally the _only_ job that will never be replaced, because it is the atom from which all the rest of the market's building blocks have been built.
AI could replace every job in the market, and company-owner would be the only job left untouched, because every other job in existence, ultimately, has been created to serve that person, not the other way around.
> ownership is literally the _only_ job that will never be replaced
Humans will always be the roots of the ownership graph, but I think AI can be any other node. Start an AI-first hedge fund or private equity firm. The AI makes the decisions. There may be a human manager, but they've agreed to be the AI's arms and ears. AI starts looking like a root owner if/when it starts managing a large charitable endowment, however.
Same thing with managers, particularly CEOs. The board may become dissatisfied with the present CEO, and start requiring that they run all decisions past an AI. The board agrees to certain values or priorities for the AI. Eventually, the AI is the one effectively in control, and the CEO is just a vestigial organ drawing a salary in case the AI ever makes a very bad decision.
The current structure is just the evolution of Norman lords, only they no longer have to worry about the pesky governing detail and can focus solely on value extraction. But corporate attitude towards humans, both their workers and the 'markets' they extract from, are if anything less humane. The Normans had to have their conquered populations housed, getting married, having kids in order to have workers/something to extract from. Corporate Normanism just throws people away/moves to another group.
Ownership is a little different; there are a lot of jobs in BigCos where they don't own the company but still basically only serve to blather half-truths to the employees.
My dad used to have a boss that he pejoratively nicknamed "VPGPT", because he felt that the way he spoke was indistinguishable from ChatGPT, and he could be replaced with ChatGPT without anyone noticing a different. This guy wasn't the owner of the company, he was just a higher-level manager.
It's easiest to mental model (for me) that those closest to the money are the last ones out the door. They control the purse strings and what the money is spent on.
So if you are the CEO, you are basically one or two tiers away from the money. Those who report to the CEO 5 levels deep are pretty far away.
Believing that someone very close to the money is going to replace themselves is incredibly naive.
If you could replace yourself with a program running on your laptop that took all your meetings and responded to your emails for you, while you did other stuff, wouldn't you? It's not naivety, I can see it as very appealing to this characature in my head of a CEO who just wants to go off and be lazy and fuck their secretary.
Would you also replace your salary and title? Or would you let your AI bot do your work for you and still get paid?
Sure owners in the end might get wise and realize they can fire the human and just keep the bot doing all the work. Or they might decide that having a person to manage all the bots instead of them is worth the money to not be bothered going all the way. Or perhaps it takes until the board alol replaces themselves with bots that those bots decide it’s time to do away with the pesky human. Either way it’s the last of the dominos to fall.
I don’t think this is about jobs. I think this is about information, power, and access to power.
The way a company with a bad C-suite gets fixed is by being competed out of existence. The way workers with bad bosses can fix that is imo limited, mostly to “find another job”.
I’m curious if anyone has ever heard of “complain to the board during the CEO’s renewal phase” being successful. It didn’t happen at places I know about.
The way that happens is you have enough money to buy enough shares to have enough votes to force a change in the board. Usually referred to as "activist shareholders" or "corporate raiders" whatnot.
>If our society was organized around the needs of workers, and existed to help workers compete at their crafts (somehow), then this would make sense.
How would this even work? "workers compete at their crafts" doesn't put food on the table. I'm sure that if "economics" and "capitalism" wasn't a factor, most of HN would be making indie games or whatever instead of making enterprise SaaS apps.
Counter-point, developers that get used to not caring about function implementation, are going to culturally also not care as much about test implementation, making this proposed ideal impossible.
I have literally never seen a correct google summary. Maybe y'all are searching for different things than i am, but at this point I've started taking the viewpoint that if I don't know why the ai summary is wrong, then i also don't know enough about the topic to trust its summary enough to determine whether the summary is useful.
I always assumed that intellectual property was invented in order to protect against a specific use case:
If researching a new product is extremely cost intensive. But once a product is invented, it is easy to reverse engineer how the product works. Then the first firm will need intellectual property to put in the initial cost, otherwise they will not do so, as they know they will not have enough time to recoup their costs in the market before a competitor moves in with a copy-cat product without having to paid the initial costs.