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Comment on Why It Was Almost Impossible to Make the Blue LED

The company didn’t invent it. A person did. The company almost stopped it from being invented. They didn’t spend millions inventing this. A person spent tens of thousands of hours inventing it.

That the funding is only available from a company is a result of the patent system. It does not spur development, it perverts it. Any ideas to the contrary are propaganda.

People have been inventing shit longer than corporations have existed. People have been inventing things without any guarantee on return on investment for most of human history.

Capitalism is bullshit and the capitalization of ideas harms humanity.

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lud@lemm.ee ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Maybe they didn’t invent it. But he wouldn’t have invented it without them.

Someone would have invented it eventually though.

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- Clent@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Correct. With or with patents and with or without copyright, it eventually would have been invented.
  
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  - lud@lemm.ee ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Yes, I watched the video. Inventing stuff is obviously very expensive and I doubt anyone could have done it without being financed in some way.
    
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    Kedly@lemm.ee ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I mean, the video even showed that there WERE notable people other than him travelling down the same path, his first few leaps were copied off them, he just figured out the last few himself
    
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LarmyOfLone@lemm.ee ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Yeah it’s pretty bad and nobody talks about it. Nobody researches the effects of patents on our global civilization. I suspect the practical role of patents is to actually retard innovation - something gets improved or invented or most of the time just engineered to work better and monopolization or just paperwork makes it too expensive for wide spread adoption. This in turn helps prevents disruptive technology from making large scale investments obsolete - instead of having to adopt and improve your factories you can continue as before because any innovation will be slow and also priced to be around as expensive as existing solutions. Or the patent can just be bought. And even if an inventor has noble intentions, starting manufacturing yourself is a totally different skill set so like most startups often fails and then the patent gets sold off. Innovation becomes a commodity.

This is my logical conclusion but it’s speculative. I suspect researching negative effects of patents is a somewhat “taboo” topic for scientists to research.

In regards to climate change this becomes… genocidal. We have hundreds of thousands of industrial processes that rely on fossil fuels or certain levels of energy. With all the before mentioned effects this basically made a timely response to climate change impossible. Every little improvement to existing processes is patented and maximized for profit. Basically we never had a chance.

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