And with plastic melting (FDM) 3D printers - they really don't have anything novel, just a bunch of steppers + heating element, all controlled with a cheap 8 bit microcontroller.
Yet AFAIK due to some patent being held by Stratasis that made only professional level horrendously expensive and proprietary 3D printers that never got any wide adoption, the 3D printing revolution was held a decade+ until the damned patent finally expired. And the rest is history.
It's a really interesting question! It worked okay for Encarta, but the original fractal-compression algorithm was the "grad student algorithm", where a grad student sat in a room fiddling with parameters until she got an image that looked right, which got really astounding compression ratios, dramatically better than the ratios they were able to deliver for Encarta. Maybe modern ANNs and optimization algorithms like Adam could produce much better fractal compression than the algorithms that were practical to automate 30 years ago?
The reason fractal compression sometimes got much better compression ratios than DCTs is apparently that it did a better job of capturing the structure of the world (a prior probability distribution), more than anything about the quirks of visual perception. We know lots of basis functions that are a little better at giving us sparse bases than DCTs for low absolute error on real-world images, even before any kind of perceptual weighting. IFSs aren't quite linear basis functions (I mean they're normally "linear", but what's being transformed linearly is the (x, y) vector and not the (r,g,b) vector), and it wouldn't be terribly surprising if they could do better still. Particularly given past examples of them doing amazing.
I think they should be more expensive too. The government shouldn't give a monopoly for cheap. Maybe $100k fee for first 5 years, with the ability to pay something like $1m to extend another 5 years would be long enough. Maybe $10M for another 5 years, and $100M for another 5 years.
You're forgetting about the small inventor. If I'm sitting in my garage and come up with a cool idea that takes me 5 years of knocking on doors to get funded, then I'll get screwed by your approach.
Small inventor already can't afford a patent. Let's say the small inventor spent the large amount of money for lawyers and patent searches and got a patent... How will they defend it when litigating a patent starts at around $1 million?
What this means is that any practical implementation of an idea needs to be a multi-million dollar idea in order to be worth patenting. Otherwise you're just wasting money.
Small inventors absolutely can afford to patent. A provisional patent for a small entity is $150. A full pro se application is something like $1500 IIRC.
The point is that with a patent, the small inventor can go on to raise further funds to exploit and defend the patent if necessary.
I’m not defending the patent system, but saying it’s too expensive doesn’t make much sense.
In some ways, I think we need a way to file a defensive patent, especially for a small player. So if you are a small firm, you can patent something and ensure that a big fish can’t also patent it and run you out of business, but without obligation (and maybe without rights to) enforce it if someone else uses your idea.
I.e., a patent that protects you against a later filer, but that’s it.
In theory, just publishing the invention means it'll become prior art and prevent its patenting. Supposedly the US patent examiners will review places like https://www.priorartarchive.org/ before issuing a new patent.
Prior art that was public knowledge before the filing is still supposed to invalidate a patent on the same thing. First-to-file means if person A was first to invent but kept their prior art secret (no publishing or filing), and then person B filed, person A's secret prior art can't invalidate B's patent.
As far as I understand patents still have to be "novel", i.e. new. You can't patent something that is already known to the public, otherwise people could start patenting chairs and sandwhiches.
Patents are meant as a reward for making an invention, the deal being that you get a monopoly on this new invention for a while and in exchange you have to tell the public how to implement your invention. If you could patent known things that would defeat the whole point.
What changed is that until recently the US operated under a first-to-invent principle, so if two people invented the same thing and they both wanted a patent on it, the one who invented it first would get the patent. As you can imagine, proving when you invented something can be quite difficult at times, and the whole process can be messy. First-to-file just means that in such a situation, the first person to file wins, which puts the US rules in line with other countries and makes things much simpler.
Well, if small inventors can not afford it (what is approximately correct), then it should just not exist. We don't need more government-enforced restrictions on small enterprises, we need less of them.
How often will that happen? The existing system seems to massively favour keeping existing big companies big. A small inventor can easily ignored. Meaning, there's quite a difference between being right and ensuring a company does the right thing.
Some products (e.g. mobile phones) are covered by hundreds of patents. A small inventor having a huge benefit from patents? It maybe happens, but I really doubt the benefits outweighs the clear damage that patents are having.
with both copyrights and patents, fees should be just rise geometrically, yearly (but can be prepaid into the future). so for instance, the first year might be $1000, the second, $2000, and the 10th year, ~$1MM (a 2^n progression). by year 20, nearly every patent and copyright would be relinquished as the fee would be ~$1B. with those kinds of rates, even disney would have to innovate to stay large and relevant, rather than sitting on their laurels and collecting rents in perpetuity.
A more famous case is the steam engine improvements by James Watt.
He used his political connections to extend his patent and only after that expired could the various improvements made by users (paricularly the cornish tin miners) be used more widely.
And as with anything that threatens the establishment, there's some right wing economist writing a paper about how it's all a myth:
Looks like he works for the Cato Institute now so we should probably consider this alongside their climate change commentary in terms of baysian likelihood of truth.
But interestingly, he's mostly responding to libertarian economist who argue that IP in general is a government monopoly with all the stuff you'd associate with that:
Fractal compression was never very good, so much so, that now, 30+ years after it's invention, is is not used anywhere. it was surpassed in nearly every way as soon as it was announced.
