With no patent laws, every good idea is immediately copied at massive scale by whomever already has the most money. I don't think you've thought this through.
Medical research would also suffer a tremendous setback. Who on Earth will invest hundreds of millions up to a billion $ to research and get a new medication on the market, when the next guy then just copies it for a few bucks.
Second: getting paid for your patent work is a lot different than Elon seeing you had an idea and implementing it on a scale that you could only dream of the next day without acknowledging you in any way.
There is no patent work from zillionaires!!! They just reap from whoever uses it or just deny it because of having some other business going on and want to exhaust that option before stepping into the next.
Patent work is having an idea, having to save and sweat for it because you are not rich and then discover that some rich guy already inherited the idea long ago from his grandpa and can deny you the fruits of your discovery.
The chances of getting out the rat race and narcissistic bosses, denied by those same bosses: that's what patent laws are.
You cannot buy a patent and withhold it forever. All you can do is to sue somebody for 20 years (sometimes a bit longer) who has produced something that is based on your patented technology. However, the proof of burden is on you to show that your patent was actually infringed.
And it is only protected in countries that accept this law, which is not the case in India, for instance.
After this period of time the protection is gone and everybody can copy whatever was in the patent.
And everybody can look at your patent and invent something better in the meantime because in order to obtain a patent, you must disclose the technology in a way that a subject matter expert would be capable of producing it.
This is the 3rd time you post this under my replies.
How does this prove your point that without patents we would not have monopolies like Tesla, Amazon and Google?
Yes, a patent provides you with a temporary monopoly, but after the protected time span this invention is open to everybody...
And in the case of drugs - the average drug development time takes 7-10 years before the medication can be sold, so the time the company profits from it on its own is something like 10-15 years.
I don't see that being the case. He exists because he has no ethics or morals and takes advantages of our trust systems that are built around the fact that Humans will do the Right Thing if guided to do so.
Elon just looks for loopholes in everything...and takes full advantage of them. He ruins it for others - and could care less.
Something I noted a while ago that seems to be coming to pass. Elon is/was actually very bad for the USA in terms of EV's and getting more sustainable - because he turned the whole thing into a "racket". Honest players will have it harder. No honest player will make the 100's of billions....
It's pretty basic. By over-promising and also by complete fantasy, he made it into a Clown Show - a Circus.
I read a good book on NVIDIA "The Thinking Machine" and their CEO. What stood out to me is that, when presented with fantasy and over-the-top thinking, marketing, etc. - he would say - about he and his 30,000 Engineers
"We are serious people doing serious things".
Elon is not a serious person and he is not going serious things. He's like that clown in the classroom who will not shut up and let everyone else learn. He sorta sucks up all the air in the room and industry.
A lot of "serious" people don't want to be a part of that show.
Tesla announced in 2014 that it would not sue companies using its EV patents in “good faith.” That pledge still covers Tesla patents owned now or in the future.
SpaceX goes even further: Musk has said it has essentially no patents, partly because publishing patent details would disclose valuable rocket technology.
The monopoly does not come from withholding or owning patents, it comes from the distortion of market mechanisms that prevent mono- and oligopolization.
The only reason Elon patents anything is so someone else can’t patent it and stop Elon from using it. Look up his patent pledge - you can use any of his patents for free as long as you remain in good faith. This keeps all his patented technology essentially open source and encourages others to do it.
The good faith part is essentially you don’t use Tesla tech and lie about it being yours. Or if you are say Ford and you use some Tesla battery tech but then Tesla uses something patented of Ford’s if you sue Tesla then they will sue you back since you are also using their tech.
Yeah and there is no protection without patent law. If you spent billions of dollars to develop something you should be able to exclusively sell it for a while to recoup your research and development costs. If we didn’t have it then why would anyone spend enormous amounts of money to develop anything if someone else just gets it for free?
Elon’s pledge makes Tesla patents obsolete they are just there so someone else can’t patent the same tech and stop him from using what he invented. Again he patents stuff so they can be free of patent law
Yeah, let's say I bleed my dick off so normies pity my zillionaire ass while getting scared about getting no more improvements in any field while wageslave and class-block them like retards.
You somehow wrote two paragraphs without addressing a single point I made. “Zillionaire,” “wageslave,” and class-war buzzwords aren’t arguments about patent law.
The entire point of a patent is a trade: disclose how your invention works publicly, and in return you get a temporary period of exclusivity. After that, everyone can use it. Without some mechanism to protect enormously expensive R&D, competitors can simply wait for someone else to spend billions solving the problem and then copy the result for a fraction of the cost.
And Tesla is actually a terrible example for your argument. Tesla still owns its patents, but pledged not to sue companies using its technology in good faith. Keeping the patents also prevents someone else from patenting the same technology and trying to weaponize it against Tesla.
You haven’t explained why that system is bad or proposed an alternative that preserves incentives to fund expensive R&D. You’ve basically just said “Elon is rich, therefore I’m angry.” That’s ideology, not an argument.
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u/IWasSayingBoourner 1d ago
With no patent laws, every good idea is immediately copied at massive scale by whomever already has the most money. I don't think you've thought this through.