<html><head><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"></head><body dir="auto"><div><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">On Monday, September 29, 2014 2:28 PM, Kelly Anderson <<a href="mailto:kellycoinguy@gmail.com" x-apple-data-detectors="true" x-apple-data-detectors-type="link" x-apple-data-detectors-result="1">kellycoinguy@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<br>On Wed, Sep 24, 2014 at 2:48 PM, Anders Sandberg <<a href="mailto:anders@aleph.se" x-apple-data-detectors="true" x-apple-data-detectors-type="link" x-apple-data-detectors-result="3">anders@aleph.se</a>> wrote:<br></span><blockquote type="cite"><blockquote type="cite"><font color="#000000"><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">I am pretty tired of Tesla hype. Yes, he was awesome and quirky,<br></span></font></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><blockquote type="cite"><font color="#000000"><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">but the one main reason he failed seems to have been lack of<br></span></font></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><blockquote type="cite"><font color="#000000"><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">business sense.</span></font></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><font color="#000000"><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br></span></font></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><font color="#000000"><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">The Wright brothers also lacked business sense. Airplanes came<br></span></font></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><font color="#000000"><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">of age quicker than patent law and courts would have allowed<br></span></font></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><font color="#000000"><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">only because of the onset of WWI and laws that made their<br></span></font></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><font color="#000000"><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">patents "national interest". It is one of a very small<br></span></font></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><font color="#000000"><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">collection of examples where I grant that the government did<br></span></font></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><font color="#000000"><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">the right thing in pushing technology forward.<br></span></font></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><font color="#000000"><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br></span></font></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><font color="#000000"><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">It is common among inventors to be poor at business. It may be<br></span></font></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><font color="#000000"><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">my own failure as well. We shall see.</span></font></blockquote><br><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">I'm inclined to question the example, and not simply because of its broken window fallacy implications -- i.e., what roads (even outside the aircraft industry) weren't taken -- but because patents themselves are an example of government intervention. It's not like it was a free market in aircraft development and manufacture. Instead, the patent system granted [temporary] monopolies. Yes, the government altered the policy during the war, but this sounds a lot like the old saw about the government breaking one's legs but then providing a really fine wheelchair, then touting the benefits of said wheelchair.<br><br>(Don't get me wrong here. I'm not saying absent patents everything would move faster and all of us would get our deepest technological desires to come true. Even so, there seems to be much evidence that patents do more harm than good. See, for example,<a href="http://www.ics.uci.edu/community/news/press/view_press?id=89" x-apple-data-detectors="true" x-apple-data-detectors-type="link" x-apple-data-detectors-result="4">http://www.ics.uci.edu/community/news/press/view_press?id=89</a> )<br><br>Regards,<br><br>Dan<br> My latest Kindle book, "Born With Teeth," is now available at:<br><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00N72FBA2" x-apple-data-detectors="true" x-apple-data-detectors-type="link" x-apple-data-detectors-result="5">http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00N72FBA2</a></span><br></div></body></html>