That’s kind of my point.

If a system keeps getting abused to grant monopolies on absurdly broad concepts, maybe the problem isn’t just bad decisions, maybe the incentives themselves are broken.

And in practice, litigation costs alone already scare away competitors long before courts decide anything.

Your proposal is definitely less bad than the current system, but it still assumes innovation needs a government referee deciding who gets exclusivity, for how long, and when taxpayers should compensate private research.

That’s the part I can’t get behind.

If the product is not commercially viable without monopoly protection or public reimbursement, maybe the business model is the issue. And if the government reimburses the company, that just means society absorbs the risk while the company keeps the upside.

Who decides the reimbursement amount? Who pays for failed research? Taxpayers? Competing companies? Consumers?

Private companies should be rewarded by the market when they create value, not guaranteed protection from competition and then reimbursed when the state decides the invention is important.

Shorter patents reduce the damage, but they don’t remove the contradiction: a “limited monopoly” is still a monopoly.

company Nintendo

We from Nintendo would appreciate it if you stopped inventing things immediately. Innovation is a protected activity.

I “take” your idea and execute it better than you, there shouldn’t be legislation stopping me

THANK YOU. Exactly. Competition is supposed to decide who wins, not the state. If your invention is genuinely great, you should dominate because you innovate faster, manufacture better, support customers better, reduce costs better, and improve continuously, not because the government threatens competitors for 20 years.

That honestly makes patents even less justifiable.

You’re not protecting a finished product or a brand reputation, you’re protecting a method, meaning you’re legally blocking alternative implementations around a problem space.

That’s exactly the kind of artificial restriction that slows competition and incremental innovation.

That argument proves the problem is scale and market power, not lack of patents.

Giving everyone a legal weapon sounds fair in theory, but in practice the biggest companies have the best lawyers, the biggest patent portfolios, and the most money to litigate. Patents often become a moat for incumbents, not a shield for small inventors.

A pro-market answer would be: reduce barriers to entry, punish fraud, enforce contracts, maybe protect trade secrets narrowly, but don’t ban competitors from building better versions.

I’m not anti-profit. I’m anti state-granted monopoly.

If you invented it first, you already have advantages: expertise, brand, speed, know-how, first-mover position, customer trust. Profit should come from executing better, not from getting the state to forbid competitors from improving on your idea.

Patents are not capitalism; they are government-enforced market exclusion.

patents should not exist

We need to stop using Reddit, WhatsApp, and YouTube… but we can’t.

That’s the real problem. These platforms stopped being “apps” a long time ago. They’re infrastructure now. Reddit is search results, tech support, product reviews, niche communities. WhatsApp is family, work, school, doctors, landlords. YouTube is tutorials, education, news clips, repairs, entertainment, background noise.

You can quit a bad product. You can’t easily quit a social standard.

And that’s exactly why they get away with so much. The cost of leaving isn’t just losing features; it’s losing access to people, knowledge, and convenience. Alternatives exist, but the network effect keeps dragging everyone back.

So yeah, we should stop using them. But realistically, the better first step is reducing dependence: use RSS, forums, Signal, PeerTube/Invidious, proper documentation, personal websites, mailing lists, and local backups wherever possible.

Not because purity is achievable, but because total dependence is dangerous.

Oh, they definitely thought it through… and then realized they could probably get more than a dollar out of us.

What surprises me more is that someone feels the need to justify staying on Linux at all. That’s a conversation that shouldn’t even exist.

The question has almost always been the other way around: why use anything else?