Liberal patent-mania is now collapsing.

Many people would not associate the concept of patents with liberalism and in fact most people would associate it with corporations and thus "the right".  But as a libertarian who sees massive liberalism in both the traditional left and right camps, it has been my view that patents, which like so many things were put into place for good reasons initially and then eventually got bastardized and distorted into a huge bureaucratic mess, have become a tool of centralized power and control.  Liberalism is about the concentration of power and control into the hands of the few so that they can wield it against the rest of us in order to extract a living out of our labor.  Liberalism is parasitism whether it is done by the liberal left or the liberal right.  Anyone who wants to control me when I am not hurting someone else is a liberal.  That's my view as a libertarian, a person who thinks the element of freedom is more important to quality of life than anything else.

The concept of patenting something increased dramatically during the massive, exponential credit increase.  The holder of a patent is given power over other people because a patent legally prohibits another person from making, using or selling something.  If you think about those three limitation, two of them are direct assaults on my freedom.  These fucks are telling me that because someone once had an idea that I cannot make something that seems similar to it for my own use?  That is ridiculous.  I can see where some could want control over my ability to make a profit off someone else's work but what if I never saw their work?  What if I came up with the idea independently?  I'm sorry, but someone who lived before you thought of the same idea and so you can't make, use or sell it.  So this again was an idea which was initially put in place for a pretty good sounding reason but which was so wide open in its implementation that the liberal, parasitic elements of society used it as a control mechanism over the rest of us.

As long as the credit was rising and the money was flowing, clamping down on individualism and individual freedoms and contributions to the economy was OK.  But now it is all slowing, peaking and rolling over and so the herd is, instinctively and without really even seeing the big picture, reversing many of these control mechanisms.  Whereas the speed limit used to be 55mph, I now commute to work each day on roads that have speed limit 75 mph and where traffic is routinely 85 mph.  In years past that would have been considered a high speed chase!  Likewise, the herd is now deconstructing the massive productivity-stifling control mechanisms which have been patents gone wild.

This is a big deal, especially because the poster child for patent abuse has been in the software realm.  The simple automation of tasks was considered patentable.  This gave current software leaders like Microsoft a big advantage and made others step gingerly for fear of attack by the Microsoft lawyer force.  It is going to be an even bigger deal given how rapidly Artificial Intelligence is progressing and how robotics will be part of our everyday lives within just a few short years.

Have you tried using the voice recognition capabilities of your Android smart phone lately?  They have tripled in capability, accuracy and presentation in just the last year.  Go ahead, try it.  Touch the little microphone button and ask your phone tabular look-up information such as "when was John Wayne born", "what is the mass of the sun", "what is the atomic number for gold".  First off, the voice reco is getting scary good.  In addition, you don't just receive links anymore.  The phone reads you a very clear answer.  Want more?  Ask your phone "what is the flight status of <carrier> <flight number>".  I tried this on my last business trip and was blown away by the excellent response and presentation.  It is almost to the point of being able to get rid of the flight status boards in the airport.  With IBM now joining AAPL in productizing Watson, you can bet that AI is going to take a quantum leap forward real soon now.  You will be able to interact very natively and intuitively with your cloudportal known as cell phone.  Tabular look up will be child's play.  You AI phone will be helping you with important decision making (or in many cases, making the decision for you!).  For the record, I saw Watson coming all the way back in 2011 and I wrote one of my highest hit count posts about it

The court rulings will not stop at software though IMO.  The whole notion of patenting will be downplayed greatly because of the coming deflation.  The herd will need products and so those who can deliver those products to the market place at low cost with high quality will receive public support.  It will coincide with the return to US based, hyper-automated manufacturing.  If you have the skills to make something of high quality that the market needs then nobody will care if you have claimed rights to it using some piece of paper.  They will only care that you actually deliver the goods.  This is really how it should be lest we allow armchair liberals to dream up ideas and then claim ownership for them even though they could never actually implement such ideas themselves.  Too many patents slow down the delivery of enhanced goods and services to the herd and so the herd will now downplay the importance of them.