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Posts tagged "patents"
Steve Jobs: Good artists copy great artists steal
Steve Jobs, back in the day:
Ultimately it comes down to taste. It comes down to trying to expose yourself to the best things that humans have done and then try to bring those things in to what you’re doing. I mean Picasso had a saying he said good artists copy great artists steal. And we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.
“We can sit by and watch competitors steal our patented inventions, or we can do something about it. We’ve decided to do something about it,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “We think competition is healthy, but competitors should create their own original technology, not steal ours.”
Related link: The Love Affair Between Steve Jobs and Pablo Picasso
(Footnote: I’ve never been able to verify that Picasso quote, but I know for a fact that T.S. Eliot said it: “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.”)
Holy shit is this episode of This American Life good.
The episode surveys the state of the US patent system, using Nathan Myhrvold’s smarmy Intellectual Ventures as a hook to tell the story.
In polls, as many as 80 percent of software engineers say the patent system actually hinders innovation. In other words, it does exactly the opposite of what it’s supposed to do. It doesn’t encourage them to come up with new ideas and create new products, it actually gets in their way.
A system for allowing a shoe wearer to lean forwardly beyond his center of gravity by virtue of wearing a specially designed pair of shoes which will engage with a hitch member movably projectable through a stage surface. The shoes have a specially designed heel slot which can be detachably engaged with the hitch member by simply sliding the shoe wearer’s foot forward, thereby engaging with the hitch member.
In other words: a patent submitted by “inventor” Michael J. Jackson!
See also: origins of the moonwalk.
(via Adam Norwood)
