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Comment by mopenstein | Hacker News Reader

Patents and copyrights are dangled like winning lottery tickets in front of the average citizen. Maybe you can invent something or write a book and sell it for millions! Which does happen... about as often as people win the lottery.

More often a patent or copyright is one of thousands a giant company procures. But all the intellectual property profiteers need is that 1 in 300,000,000 chance dangling in front of a voter and they'll never agree to do away with IP, in fact, the opposite will happen. They'll actively fight to keep them in place.

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Somehow the winning ticket in popular discourse is to be a patent troll: at best, "sell my idea" to some big company (troll); at worst convince a court to give you a pile of money because someone "stole" your idea (in advance). It is a rare person who dreams of coming up with a good idea and then working hard for years to make it a reality.

How many patent trolls do you know? As compared to people that you know who would/could be an inventor on a patent? I'm a patent litigator and it's still the latter for me. This narrative is a bit histrionic.

As a software developer, I'm not exactly representative, nor are you. The point was about ambition/popular perception, not the reality. If your "maybe someday" dream prominently features being issued a patent, it's not because you'll use the patent responsibily to defend the idea that you're actively developing and marketing. If your "maybe someday" plan involves developing and marketing an idea, patents might be a factor somewhere way down the list of how to get there, but that's a very different ambition.

(That's not to say that the reality isn't also broken, just that popular perception is even more broken.)

> The point was about ambition/popular perception, not the reality.

What a silly point then. Who cares what people's perceptions are when they are not based in reality.

> If your "maybe someday" dream prominently features being issued a patent, it's not because you'll use the patent responsibily to defend the idea that you're actively developing and marketing.

I see, so nobody can get a patent because nobody will use a patent "responsibly".

There's no point in furthering this conversation.

Hmmmm, I mostly know people who worked for big companies who got BS patents for bragging rights and one from a small startup with one obvious idea but they wanted to try and protect themselves since the idea was essential to their core business. The former don't seem much different from trolls while the latter should not have been granted a patent since it was so obvious IMO.

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