Who's "intellectual property" are we protecting, exactly, when a machine generates the knowledge?
I hope we can update before it's too late to matter.
AI and AI companies have a similar pathway open to them where they will take a lot of information already out there and then gatekeep the synthesis based on that information (obtained without compensation in most cases) as well as to harvest all of the latent knowledge underneath. This is a bad development in my opinion but I'm sure that their shareholders believe it is great.
The same misinformation exists about music agencies, who organize concerts and take a hefty fee.
But those were welcomed by musicians. In the early days (18th century), musicians had to do advertising themselves when traveling to a new city. The innovation was to have an impresario (literally someone who travels ahead of them) to do the organizing.
What musicians don't want is Internet middlemen who pretend to act in their interests and take an even higher cut.
You seem to be very convinced and yet provided no evidence whatsoever. Here is a source for the opposite: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15305476
You get protection from the state for making the actual knowledge public but only you are allowed to monetize that knowledge for a period of time.
Arguably the period is far too long, but the concept makes sense.
The alternative is, indeed, trade secrets, where you don’t get state protection if your secret is figured out by someone else (you still cannot steal the secret).
If the AI companies were to hoard knowledge they could also do it though trade secrets and not patents.
The system is too vulnerable to regulatory capture.
Separately, land grabs are not necessarily economically bad. The land being grabbed gets into productive use fast, and the grabber is hardly going to get all the resulting value. Especially not when the monopoly is temporary, as with a patent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...
I suppose it's worth distinguishing the type of machine though.
If a genetic algorithm comes up with a unique design and I patent it, that's okay, right?
I think the main issue with LLMs is what went into them. Like we saw recently with Anthropic's revolutionary source control breakthroughs, which turned out to already be in the training data:
That depends.
To what degree was your input decisive?
Did you come up with the genetic algorithm?
Is your patent written in a way that it tries to stop others from generating antennas using genetic algorithms?