[ExI] Problem with Pattents

[Rafal Smigrodzki]

On Fri, Feb 22, 2008 at 7:53 PM, Bryan Bishop <kanzure at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Friday 22 February 2008, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote:
>
> > on his own, or just cribbed from the PTO site. But in the
>  > not-too-distant future it will be possible to prove the satisfaction
>  > of any court that a given mind was never exposed to information about
>  > a device made public previously.
>
>  Interesting idea, but limited. Suppose that I have never seen the
>  invention of patent xyz, but instead I see parts of the same signal in
>  other ways, such as different people saying parts of the patent, but in
>  no specified way that would be necessarily identifiable as the patent
>  itself, merely as something that would lead me to think the same
>  thoughts given my known neurochemistry. This makes for a blurry
>  situation, and even if you had access to all inputs since the beginning
>  that a particular person has had, when do you stop being schizophrenic
>  and drawing useless connections between all parts of the datastream.

### If you can replicate an invention by enumerating all connections
in your datastream, the invention is not that brilliant. If a random
mind can produce it quickly, there is no reason to claim protection
for it, since your competitors could easily replicate it, and avoid
having to pay you. If, on the other hand, it takes thousands of minds
or minds of unusual quality (and price), then re-doing the invention
would be as costly as the initial claim. Either way, the inventor
could charge a price that would be just below the market clearing
price (i.e. the average expected price of re-invention), and thus
maximize utility for both consumer and inventor, as expected from a
market interaction.

Rafal