In an advanced society like the one we want to achieve, it is important to leave behind the old patent system. Knowledge and inventions should be free. It is ok to recognise the creator for its invention, but inventions should be free to use and manipulate. Patents doesn't make sense in our world anymore.

Thanks.

Copyright is for written documents and protects authors and the like from having their hard work stolen and redistributed without their permission. If copyright did not exist, authors would have no incentive to produce. I see no reason why this protection is unnecessary unless there is a complete lack of economy or requirement to 'earn a living'.

Perhaps you are referring to patent? If so, that would only work in a society where resources are freely available to everyone equally. Patents protect intellectual property, in particular inventions, and are used by individuals and companies to allow them time to produce a product, take it to market, and attempt to get back the amount of resources they had to spend to invent the thing in the first place.

Now, I will agree that the process in the US needs some work. The copyright durations are too long and it is far too easy to sue over patents at the moment. 

HJA

Just for discussion... If we do set aside the current copyright option for documentation, what options would we have for safe keeping documentation for documents such as, blueprints for the space station, constitutional documents, and other such documents that may be printed. What kind of technology currently exists or is being tested to help us to go paperless, and still have the security we need for things like this?

To Zahira:

I meant to say patents, as Phicksur corrected me.

So, in this society are we considering is where people have free access to unlimited resources? Or, perhaps, that projects are only begun if they have sufficient public acceptance that the limited resources available are democratically agreed upon to be spent on projects that require them?

Those are the only two circumstances I can conceive where such an idea as a lack of patents would work. In all other circumstances, patents protect the inventor's time and investment in the design, testing, and implementation of a product.

What I believe should NOT be done is the patenting of ideas. If you cannot manufacture a product yourself, but have an idea, you can go into partnership with a manufacturer that can and then build the product, or gather sufficient capital to build such manufacturing facilities on your own.

MDN

If we are serious about developing an Asgardian economy, what about changing the way patents work?

I can speak with some experience here as i have been through the long, complex and painful patent process. I developed some nice new tech related to renewable energy generation and greenhouse gas reduction, got it beyond proof of concept and initial trial and was just at the point of commercialisation... when the government made some snap changes to renewable energy targets and eliminated the carbon emissions trading scheme, literally killing the commercial viability of the invention. In the hope that things will change, I kept the patent for a few years, but without income from the invention, I've been unable to meet the ongoing costs of sustaining the patent. It is now lost and the only people that seem to have benefited are patent lawyers and the patent office..

What if the state was equally invested in the patent (ie. the joint inventors would be Asgardia and the person)? This seems to have a few advantages:

1. The existing global patent system (which is unlikely to change) can still be used.
2. Asgardia could act as a quasi venture capital body for inventions with a likelihood of being commercially viable.
3. The individual inventor still gets recognition (and reward) for their work.
4. The proceeds of licence fees / profits coming to Asgardia from inventions can be re-invested in R&D and further commercialisation.
5. It will attract some of the best and brightest to Asgardia to do their work.

Personally, I think it naive to believe that Asgardia will be economically separate from Earth (at least in the short to medium term), so why not use the existing patent / economic systems to Asgardia's advantage?

Yeah, at least ideas should not be patented in Asgardia.

It is ok to patent your implementation of an idea, but the idea itself not.

I think there should be some form of patents available. Perhaps if an Asgardian invents or discovers something and then patents it, the invention/discovery can be used freely within Asgardia, per discretion of the Ministry of Science. The Ministry of Science will also determine whether or not and how to best share what we discover with the rest of the world in order to get the most beneficial use out of it for humanity, without ruining it for Asgardia and the discoverer (i.e. prevent weaponizing etc).

Get my point?

If our patent process is such that Asgardia itself is the patent-holder, and our laws state that any Asgardian can use a patent owned by Asgardia, but the rest of the world would have to pay in accordance with their local laws, that would suffice for the legal entanglement of patents, I believe.

ZPJ

Asgarida has to adopt the actual patents system outside asgardia. What we could do is to place everything in Asgardia Domain and restrict their use for free with any right to modify for Asgardia use. But this will require an Authority who authorize, defines and observes the use of Asgardia Collective Intellectual Properties. And to represent any law issue to the rest of the world, for every single collective intellectual property. The side effect would be that we aren't allowed to "fork" actual existing patents.

It's not entirely impossible, but that requires a lot of work to formalize such a system and to create laws to regulate that.

I would love such an intellectual property system and I would support it for Asgardia.