The patent system only makes in a world in which you have a finite number of industries performing a finite number of useful tasks. Then the social context lets you distinguish useful and useless inventions. Even then, the GGP's point of nontrivial works naturally belonging to their inventors is balderdash. What you can say, all you can say, is, with physical inventions in a fairly static world, that society can somewhat coherently grant people monopolies on inventions for public policy purposes.
But in a world where every activity, including the modification of the physical world, is approach "information processing", the whole patent system is become logically unsupportable. In this information processing world, a patent is government granting people deeds to an ill-defined terrain. And it's fairly clear our world is getting closer to that, is it not?
And with a ill-defined terrain, common sense about what's useful, common usage, etc just go out the window. All patents approach the status of troll-patents.
The patent system only makes in a world in which you have a finite number of industries performing a finite number of useful tasks. Then the social context lets you distinguish useful and useless inventions. Even then, the GGP's point of nontrivial works naturally belonging to their inventors is balderdash. What you can say, all you can say, is, with physical inventions in a fairly static world, that society can somewhat coherently grant people monopolies on inventions for public policy purposes.
But in a world where every activity, including the modification of the physical world, is approach "information processing", the whole patent system is become logically unsupportable. In this information processing world, a patent is government granting people deeds to an ill-defined terrain. And it's fairly clear our world is getting closer to that, is it not?
And with a ill-defined terrain, common sense about what's useful, common usage, etc just go out the window. All patents approach the status of troll-patents.