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Comment by LionTamer | Hacker News Reader

How do you think humans should incentivize R&D without allowing for those who successfully deployed R&D to protect their ability to reap the fruits of their efforts? I’m sympathetic and am very interested in the idea of the government creating public goods out of intellectual property on a national level (ie instead of rewarding copyrights/parents the government would buy out the creator and make it free for citizens to do what they’d like), but that could work because the government has sovereignty over its territory - how do you prevent international free riding on R&D?

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For the research part (figuring out something previously impossible)? No need to incentivise, the kick of figuring it out is enough to motivate people, just provide UBI so the nerds can tinker.

For the development/application part? Let people race to figure out the best way to deploy things before someone else does, the way the swiss and Germans and Chinese did in the free for all time. I've heard competition be called something that incentivises people to find edges that aren't easily copied, and trade secrets can still exist

> For the research part (figuring out something previously impossible)? No need to incentivise, the kick of figuring it out is enough to motivate people, just provide UBI so the nerds can tinker.

I think this is only true to a certain extent. We have reached a point where a lot of new innovation and invention is only possible with a truly tremendous amount of financial investment. No amount of tinkering in your garage is going to bring about the next advancement in EUV lithography. You need an entity with a lot of capital and a strong incentive to bring many of these things about. That can come from either the private sector or the government, but it cannot realistically be pulled out of thin air.

Yeah, but we were talking about incentives not about finding capital. Nerds are perfectly capable of writing proposals, budgets, etc. if they have the time, and if there is not need to feed constituents and make a profit of the results, it can be done cheaply and under budget. You might still want to spend time optimising this, but the incentives are there already and need not to be set (provide public goods, have fun doing it)

> trade secrets can still exist

How can trade secrets exist if we are “just sharing ideas openly with each other”?

A lot of government funded R&D e.g. from the NIH or NSF has stipulations actually that say the data and results be made publicly available so that other researchers may benefit. At the end of the day we have to decide where our values lie. Do they lie with individualized benefit? Then we allow people to have protection legally so they may individually profit off of that technology using a perverted market condition (them having the sole rights of distribution for a period of time). If we value the collective whole, then we would share these ideas with others who would benefit from them and further them still, like we do medical research. You have to decide where your moralities lie.

I'd just make the individuals involved rich with a lump-sum payment ($10m, say) and a lot of good press. Then make it public domain.

What if they spent $20m to create the innovation? Who judges when an innovation is appropriate to convert in the manner? What happens to the innovations that aren't deemed worthy of conversion?

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