Gimly
Seeing this meme always remind me that they decided to translate “walkie talkie” in French to “talkie walkie”… I mean… Why?
In France they have public toilets that basically do number 4. The toilet gets completely cleaned automatically with hot water and detergent after you used it. It works by locking up after you unlocked the door after using it. If you hold the door for someone, they get the cleaning treatment.
This! Patent, trademarks, copyrights, all those intellectual properties laws were created more than a century ago, a time very different from us, with no corporations capable of pushing hundreds if not thousands of patents per year.
Those laws are so outdated that they are played to the inverse of what they were supposed to do. They were created to protect the inventor to make sure he can win money on his invention, today they are used to protect big corporation to make sure they can buy or kill whoever who would risk attacking their revenue.
They were invented as a way to push creativity and protect it but they are used today to limit and block creativity. There’s a good reason why creativity in technology in the last 10 years has come more from open source movements (additive manufacturing, blockchain, machine learning, etc.). It’s the only way to still protect creativity, making it open, therefore non patentable.
But that’s something that I witnessed change since the 80’s and makes the electronic crappier, it’s the fact that appliances in the 70’s-90’s were incredibly easy to fix. It was not rare for the manufacturer to even give schematics in the user’s manual. There were shops to repair stuff everywhere and it was something approachable by anyone who could hold a soldering iron.