-
Notifications
You must be signed in to change notification settings - Fork 0
/
patent.html
183 lines (174 loc) · 10.7 KB
/
patent.html
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
136
137
138
139
140
141
142
143
144
145
146
147
148
149
150
151
152
153
154
155
156
157
158
159
160
161
162
163
164
165
166
167
168
169
170
171
172
173
174
175
176
177
178
179
180
181
182
183
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8" />
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0" /><meta name="generator" content="Docutils 0.19: https://docutils.sourceforge.io/" />
<title>Treatise on applicability of patents in the modern age — Nothing special</title>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="_static/pygments.css" />
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="_static/classic.css" />
<script data-url_root="./" id="documentation_options" src="_static/documentation_options.js"></script>
<script src="_static/doctools.js"></script>
<script src="_static/sphinx_highlight.js"></script>
<link rel="index" title="Index" href="genindex.html" />
<link rel="search" title="Search" href="search.html" />
<link rel="copyright" title="Copyright" href="copyright.html" />
</head><body>
<div class="related" role="navigation" aria-label="related navigation">
<h3>Navigation</h3>
<ul>
<li class="right" style="margin-right: 10px">
<a href="genindex.html" title="General Index"
accesskey="I">index</a></li>
<li class="nav-item nav-item-0"><a href="index.html">Nothing special</a> »</li>
<li class="nav-item nav-item-this"><a href="">Treatise on applicability of patents in the modern age</a></li>
</ul>
</div>
<div class="document">
<div class="documentwrapper">
<div class="bodywrapper">
<div class="body" role="main">
<section id="treatise-on-applicability-of-patents-in-the-modern-age">
<h1>Treatise on applicability of patents in the modern age<a class="headerlink" href="#treatise-on-applicability-of-patents-in-the-modern-age" title="Permalink to this heading">¶</a></h1>
<p><em>This article is still being written.</em></p>
<p>When history of human civilization is being considered one factor of incredible
importance is often omitted. I’m talking about basic physical quantity, which
determines the inner working of all things existing, available free energy.</p>
<p>This situation is quite understandable, as history was seldom considered to be
a precise science (fortunately, historic science evolves toward being more
precise). Even Karl Heinrich Marx, with his ahead of time insight, that human
society is primarily shaped by the available means of production, had not fully
followed the idea through. This caused a lot of confusion in later times, and
still stirs controvery, even though the basic idea proved itself correct on
multiple occassions, owning to distruptive techological changes of 19th and
20th centuries. Since Marx’s theories are associated with the political movement
called communism (the connection is not, in fact, obvious) I’ll refer to the
fictional universe of <a class="reference external" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_trek_tng">Star Trek: The Next Generation</a>
television series as a tongue-in-cheeck example. The social organisation
depicted there almost precisely corresponds to communist utopia and it’s
only made possible by the existence of perfect replication technology and
intelligent automation. Indeed, if technological means allowed material
wishes of any society member to simply come true without much effort
(this includes arbitrarily complex entertainment setups, to the level of
better than real simulated people), most, if not all, social problems we are
facing these days will simply disappear.</p>
<p>Available energy was the primary factor shaping the development of human
civilization through most of its history. Society needed energy direly.
Personal access to even a couple of working horses (2 HPs, 1.5 kWt of power)
guaranteed personal well-being and considerably higher quality of living
compared to unfortunate people who had to rely on their bare hands. Invention
of modern sailing rig (very efficient way to harvest wind energy) immediately
put the rest of the world into the mercy of European navies, thanks to faster
and more manoeuvrable ships. Forging of metals, just the same, was mostly
bound by the amount of harvestable fuel, and greatly improved with the
invention of water wheel assisted mines and forges. In short, whatever great
ideas Archimedes of Syracuse, Leonardo da Vinci or any other inventor of old
could have, their realisation was rendered impossible by the absence of
sufficient energy reserves. Human creativity was essentially supressed by
energy deficite.</p>
<p>Invention and wide adoption of steam engines and fossil fuels in the late
18th – early 19th century brought not only quantitative, but enormous
qualitative change, which we call now “Industrial Revolution”. In its
deepest essence, the whole change was about solving the everlasting energy
deficite. It’s not like energy became free, far from it. Rather, it finally
was possible to produce enough energy on demand to solve any engineering
problem pending.</p>
<p>The Prometheus of human creativity was finally delivered from his bounds.
A lot of talented and enterprising people rushed to explore and create things,
which couldn’t even be dreamed about a couple of generation beforehand. To
bring some order into this sudden “gold rush” of engineering activity, modern
patent system was introduced.</p>
<p>Here, it’s a good time to clarify the meaning of the technological patent. Its
concept is much older, than industrial revolution and was always envisioned to
serve as competition regulator. Kings granted patents to selected manufactures
to protect their income levels, as failing to do so could very well result
with all skillful artisans dying from hunger at some unfortunate point of time.
This is of course a vast simplification and the system often suffered from
abuse, but the intention was precisely this.</p>
<p>Same intention was carried into the conception of 19th century technological
patents. All people think roughly in the same way (otherwise, inter-personal
communication will be outright impossible), so even most ground-breaking ideas
normally occur to multiple people working within some technological discipline.
Additionally, people, true to the primate origins, are very good in reverse
engineering and copying things. Anybody familiar with history of industrial
espionage could notice how quickly even best guarded trade secrets were
stolen or guessed from the available products. Therefore, the purpose of
disclosure in technological patent is not to serve as some form of magazine,
publishing new ideas for everybody’s enjoyment (despite what some patent
proponents like to say), but merely describe, what is being protected from
competition for the sake of future conflict resolution.</p>
<p>One important feature that patents have not never posessed is encouragement
of the inventor proper. Out of hundreds thousands of presently filed patents
only counted examples exist of inventors becoming rich thanks to their
technological ingenuity. In fact, researching almost any successful inventor’s
biography we invariably find the story of deceit and exploitation, often of
blatant or outright criminal nature. Of course, there should be exceptions from
this unsfortunate rule, some people who managed to benefit from their justly
obtained patents without harming anybody, but scarcity of such cases only
reminds us of Cicero’s famous maxim: <em>exceptio probat regulam in casibus non
exceptis</em>.</p>
<p>Nevertheless, we may assume that the net result of patent system use in the 19th
century was probably beneficial for the society. As I already pointed out above,
that century benefited from the unseen before explosion in creative thought
fueled by the invention of seemingly endless compact energy source.
Consequentially, there was an abundance of “low hanging” technological ideas,
allowing every decent enterpreneur to have literally dozens of projects to
pursuit, even if he is unable to claim patent protection on some of them. Patent
system, acting in its natural role of competition regulator, artificially
limited the rate of progress (which was way to fast), allowing some people
a little of creative breathing space and letting others some more adaption time
to the changing landscape of civilization. Negative effects of the patent
system during that era were additionally offset by national ambition: sovereign
states seldom bothered to honour other nation’s patent, especially if patents
in question treatened to curdle their aspirations for world domination.</p>
<p>Everything has its ending, and so the wonderful age of steam, ingenius inventors
and cunning crooks, aptly named <em>Belle Époque</em> by french, had ended in the
flames of Great War. This enormously important conflict coincided and was
caused, among other things, by a sort of techological “Maltusian” crysis. This
crysis shaped the techological progress and, necessarily, the future of humanity
since then. Even discarding technological issues it seems that we are stuck in
a long, slowly fading aftermath of 1918. Needless to say that fiery hecatombs of
World War II proved to be completely futile and unable to influence anything.</p>
</section>
<div class="clearer"></div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="sphinxsidebar" role="navigation" aria-label="main navigation">
<div class="sphinxsidebarwrapper">
<div role="note" aria-label="source link">
<h3>This Page</h3>
<ul class="this-page-menu">
<li><a href="_sources/patent.rst.txt"
rel="nofollow">Show Source</a></li>
</ul>
</div>
<div id="searchbox" style="display: none" role="search">
<h3 id="searchlabel">Quick search</h3>
<div class="searchformwrapper">
<form class="search" action="search.html" method="get">
<input type="text" name="q" aria-labelledby="searchlabel" autocomplete="off" autocorrect="off" autocapitalize="off" spellcheck="false"/>
<input type="submit" value="Go" />
</form>
</div>
</div>
<script>document.getElementById('searchbox').style.display = "block"</script>
</div>
</div>
<div class="clearer"></div>
</div>
<div class="related" role="navigation" aria-label="related navigation">
<h3>Navigation</h3>
<ul>
<li class="right" style="margin-right: 10px">
<a href="genindex.html" title="General Index"
>index</a></li>
<li class="nav-item nav-item-0"><a href="index.html">Nothing special</a> »</li>
<li class="nav-item nav-item-this"><a href="">Treatise on applicability of patents in the modern age</a></li>
</ul>
</div>
<div class="footer" role="contentinfo">
© <a href="copyright.html">Copyright</a> 2010 - 2023, Alex Dubov <oakad@yahoo.com>.
Created using <a href="https://www.sphinx-doc.org/">Sphinx</a> 6.1.3.
</div>
</body>
</html>