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Comment by antihero | Hacker News Reader

It's pretty undeniable that the whole patents thing is now one giant clusterfuck.

The problem is, as technology advances, previously "genius" ideas become trivial due to more people being able to solve problems.

There was a time in history when things such as spoons were considered an amazing idea, but how utterly fucked would humanity's development have been if stone-age people allowed themselves to be crippled by greed and a the blind seeking of money.

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It's not just that technology advances; patents eventually expire. The problem is that the electronics industry advances an order of magnitude faster. A patent in the farm-tractor industry takes two years to start making money and is still non-obvious 25 years later. A patent in the handheld electronics or algorithms industry takes two weeks to start making money and can be obsolete 25 months later. It's still a giant clusterfuck, but it's close enough that it only needs a major reform.

We'd all be eating porridge with a spork.

The spork would undoubtedly have been found infringing and sued out of existence. We'd be eating it with a fork.

Or a paddle/spatula. They might have been able to argue that it wasn't a spoon because there were no raise edges.

Or chopsticks.

Assuming someone hasn't patented a stick.

(Or come to think about it, the chewing process.)

Sticks may be fine, as long as you don't use it to play fetch with your dog later: http://www.google.com/patents?id=hhYJAAAAEBAJ&zoom=4&...

http://www.google.com/patents?id=DlttAAAAEBAJ&zoom=4&...

It appears that's allowable now, since the patent has expired.

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