No Stupid Questions
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
view the rest of the comments
If you hold a patent, then you have an exclusive right to that invention for a fixed period, which would be 20 years from the filing date in the USA. That would mean Ford could not claim the same or a derivative invention, at least not for the parts which overlap with your patent. So yes, you could sit on your patent and do nothing until it expires, with some caveats.
But as a practical matter, the necessary background research, the application itself, and the defense of a patent just to sit on it would be very expensive, with no apparent revenue stream to pay for it. I haven't looked up what sort of patent Ford obtained (or maybe they've merely started the application) but patents are very long and technical, requiring whole teams of lawyers to draft properly.
For their patent to be valid, they must not overlap with an existing claim, as well as being novel and non-obvious, among other requirements. They would only file a patent to: 1) protect themselves from competition in future, 2) expect that this patent can be monetized by directly implementing it, or licensing it out to others, or becoming a patent troll and extracting nuisance-value settlements, or 3) because they're already so deep in the Intellectual Property land-grab that they must continue to participate by obtaining outlandish patents. The latter is a form of "publish or perish" and allows them to appear like they're on the cutting edge of innovation.
A patent can become invalidated if it is not sufficiently defended. This means that if no one even attempts to infringe, then your patent would be fine. But if someone does, then you must file suit or negotiate a license with them, or else they can challenge the validity of your patent. If they win, you'll lose your exclusive rights and they can implement the invention after all. This is not cheap, and Ford has deep pockets.
Why in the fuck is copyright protection longer than patent protection? I feel like both should be 10-20 years maximum, but if you have to full on invent something, then work out production, the get sales going, I can see an argument for 20 years. But just drawing a fucking mouse gets you life of creator plus years beyond that?
I guess Disney isn’t waiting for competitors IP to hit public domain, but another type of company lobbying for longer patent terms might wind up with an own goal by locking themselves out of using some newly refined processes or something? It just seems really weird they haven’t been increased together.
Because it's a lot easier for Disney to churn out mickey mouse cartoons than it is for General Electric to come up with an entirely new rotating joint for the helicopter mounted motorized minigun
Although copyright and patents (and trademarks) are lumped together as "intellectual property", there's almost nothing which is broadly applicable to them all, and they might as well be considered separately. The only things I can think of -- and I'm not a lawyer of any kind -- are that: 1) IP protection is mentioned vaguely in the US Constitution, and 2) they all behave as property, in that they can be traded/reassigned. That's it.
With that out of the way, it's important to keep in mind that patent rights are probably the strongest in the family of IP, since there's no equivalent "fair use" (US) or "fair dealing" (UK) allowance that copyright has. A patent is almost like owning an idea, whereas copyright is akin to owning a certain rendition plus a derivative right.
Disney has leaned on copyright to carve for themselves an exclusive market of Disney characters, while also occasionally renewing their older characters (aka derivatives), so that's why they lobby for longer copyright terms.
Whereas there isn't really a singular behemoth company whose bread-and-butter business is to churn out patents. Inventing stuff is hard, and so the lack of such a major player means a lack of lobbying to extend patent terms.
To be clear, there are companies who rely almost entirely on patent law for their existence, just like Disney relies on copyright law. But type foundries (companies that make fonts) are just plainly different than Disney. Typefaces (aka fonts) as a design can be granted patents, and then the font files can be granted copyright. But this is a special case, I think.
The point is: no one's really clamoring for longer parents, and most people would regard a longer exclusive term on "ideas" to be very problematic. Esp if it meant pharmaceutical companies could engage in even more price-gouging, for example.