Comments on: Patents and Tacit Knowledge

By: Two Kinds of Innovation

Two Kinds of Innovation — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 20:45:14 +0000

[...] commenter on the other day’s patent post makes an important point: I also thought that even if an idea is obvious, it won’t be implemented [...]

By: Commonalities Between i4i and Microsoft | Boycott Novell

Commonalities Between i4i and Microsoft | Boycott Novell — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 11:35:34 +0000

[...] patent of i4i is being severely criticised here: I think the source of the problem in the patent system may be linked to a point Friedrich Hayek [...]

By: Click World News » Blog Archive » Just Because Something’s New Doesn’t Mean It’s Not Obvious

Sat, 15 Aug 2009 02:39:49 +0000

[...] injunction against Microsoft Word over a blatantly obvious patent, and Julian did a great job explaining why obviousness and newness are different and why explaining obviousness can be so difficult. The argument is that since it’s so difficult to [...]

By: alan

alan — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 15:30:59 +0000

having tacit knowledge is nothing. To be the master of an idea, you must be able to pass it on. Patent applications are routinely dis-allowed because they don’t sufficiently “enable” a person of ordinary skill in the art, to reproduce the invented idea. It is not an acident that patent jurisprudence calls a patent a “teaching”.

ideas are nothing. the power of an idea whose time has come, is zero. What counts, is “being able to show the best mode”, as patent jurisprudence calls it.

By: Julian Sanchez

Julian Sanchez — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 22:30:15 +0000

Well, nonetheless, presumably there are many ten-year-olds proficient in arithmetic who would be hard-pressed to provide even that abbreviated account.

But yeah, I think you have the seed of a broader, maybe fairly important point about the blurring of the distinction between technological and entrepreneurial innovation.

By: Justin

Justin — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 22:17:32 +0000

Nice post. I also thought that even if an idea is obvious, it won’t be implemented until someone realizes that they have a need for it. I guess this falls under the question of whether there’s prior art, but it would also be a reason why obvious ideas might not be developed for a long time.

A side note: even as a loose analogy, I’m not sure that Principia is a good example. You can have what’s intuitively a rigorous and explicit treatment of the numbers that’s a lot shorter.

My first course in analysis used a textbook that just started from the axioms for an ordered field plus the axiom that every convergent sequence converges to an element of the field (I think I’ve got those right). Given those axioms, you still have to prove that 0 and 1 are distinct, which seems pretty rigorous. And you can do that in just a few pages.