What Creators Know About Patents.

What Creators Know About Patents.

Great creators know that patents are mostly a human video game of sorts that they are required to partake in. They create things because they have a disease of the soul that makes them feel sick if they’re not creating things. Patents are not necessary for a resourceful creator’s success.

Great products that are used by millions of people generally allow us to discover new ideas, concepts, and problems that we couldn’t have seen before without their existence.

The World’s First Shrimp Peeler.

Take for example the case of the meteoric rise of the Shrimp industry and its derivative inventions.

In 1949 James Lapeyre stepped on a piece of shrimp and the skin came undone from the shrimp. He used this knowledge and invented the world’s first shrimp peeler and blew up and unlocked the capability of the shrimp industry.

The Conveyor Belts Started Rusting.

Millions of pounds of shrimp were being pulled into the peelers and the conveyor belts started rusting from the salt.

The resultant invention was plastic modular conveyor belts which were rolled into Intralox, a billion dollar company, that has changed the way conveyor belts are manufactured and optimized. Intralox now services 60,000 customers.

“In 1949, Intralox founder J.M. Lapeyre[3][4] invented an automatic shrimp-peeling machine [5][6] that changed the industry. J.M. patented his shrimp peeler and 190 other inventions during his lifetime. He also founded four companies — all based on his inventions. Intralox, one of those four companies, registered the first patent for modular plastic belting in 1970.”

The basic idea is that distributed products with lots of users cause new problems to emerge.

The Realities of Patents.

• Less than 3% of patents make money. The rest are the equivalent of digital domain-squatting, and the real problem is that people can squat on technologies that are fundamental to the progress of humanity.
• Software patents are the epitome of bullshit.
• Patent trolls are extreme bullshit.
• Transistors, conductors, inductors, diodes, and inductors make up the beauty of modern electronics. The concept that we can patent every iteration of such beautiful components both on a printed circuit board and integrated circuit is hogwash. Imagine if you patented every iteration of <div>, CSS, href, and other style of tag that exists. The existence of the 1984 SCPA has arguably been the single most damning legislation for the planet.
• Apple and Samsung spend more on patents than on creating products.
• The cost of a patent is discouraging to innovation and creation with the entry cost being $15K–$20K for a rock solid patent. The spirit of creation is frugality, resourcefulness, and iteration. Patents discourage this in their current format.
• Patents keep the price of killer medical devices abnormally high, bottlenecking distribution, and crippling the potential emergence of new ideas. This article explains how.

The future is a world where patents don’t exist, where the consummate creators can build on top of previous inventions without the nuances of having to close licensing deals with emotional figureheads.

Patents are government granted monopolies of the previous century that humanity must overcome.