Skip to main content

Home/ sharingknowledge/ Group items tagged patents

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Innovation Blues

Ben Franklin on Patents; in which he provides a Selfless model for Sharing an... - 0 views

  • Ben Franklin on Patents; in which he provides a Selfless model for Sharing and Cooperation; Inspires us with his Generosity; and Lends Moral Authority to the Principles of Free Culture…
  • in 1742, invented an open stove for the better warming of rooms, and at the same time saving fuel, as the fresh air admitted was warmed in entering, I made a present of the model to Mr. Robert Grace, one of my early friends, who, having an iron-furnace, found the casting of the plates for these stoves a profitable thing, as they were growing in demand.
  • Gov’r. Thomas was so pleas’d with the construction of this stove, as described in it, that he offered to give me a patent for the sole vending of them for a term of years; but I declin’d it from a principle which has ever weighed with me on such occasions, viz., That, as we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours; and this we should do freely and generously.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography
  • Reading about free software specifically and free culture in general causes a dangerous uptick in my idealism index. Idealism in the sense of hoping and even believing that we can all get along. (Somehow. Someday.) That we can help each other. I think I had a healthy share of idealism growing up but gradually over the years I’ve addressed this vulnerability by developing an outer shell of jaded cynicism. It’s much more comforting to have no hope than to have hopes that can be crushed. However, there is a good chance with this strategy that your heart will shrink a couple of sizes.
  • But then I read essays by Richard Stallman, listen to speeches by Eben Moglen, and read and listen to many other hopeful voices, and I start to see something better. Like Fox Mulder, I want to believe. Which of course is dangerous. You leave yourself open to ridicule if you believe. You might be dismissed as being naive. To which of course we should say, “So what?” I want to believe that we can do better.
  • The great moral question of the twenty-first century is: If all knowledge, all culture, all art, all useful information, can be costlessly given to everyone at the same price that it is given to anyone — if everyone can have everything, everywhere, all the time, why is it ever moral to exclude anyone from anything? If you could make lamb chops in endless numbers by the mere pressing of a button, there would be no moral argument for hunger ever, anywhere. I see no system of moral philosophy generated by the economy of the past that could evolve a principle to explain the moral legitimacy of denial in the presence of infinite profusion.
Innovation Blues

Nikola Tesla - The Complete Patents of Nikola Tesla - The Man who invented the 20th Cen... - 0 views

  • The Complete Patents of Nikola Tesla
  • Nikola Tesla, the "man who invented the twentieth century,"
  • He did emigrate and he did go to work for Edison, but for less than a year, until the fee promised for a particularly difficult project, redesign of an Edison dynamo, failed to materialize.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Tesla consulted, invented, invested–forming with his backers a number of companies and producing the forty or so fundamental AC patents that revolutionized the running of industrial America.
Innovation Blues

NewsWhip | News Worth Sharing - 0 views

  • We live in a world of too much information. With thousands of stories published each day, how can you find the best quality and the most compelling? We think the answer lies with people. We humans have an instinct for good stories, and we know the news stories worth sharing with our friends. So we’ve built a technology that tracks all the news shared on Facebook and Twitter each day, to find the fastest spreading, most shared, highest quality stuff, and reveal it to the world.
  • How it works NewsWhip's technology tracks all the news published by about 5,000 English-language sources –about 60,000 news stories each day. It gathers social data for each story – how many shares, likes, tweets and comments it has – at repeated intervals, building a live picture of how popular it is, right now. With this information, it calculates a social speed at which each story is travelling. The process is unique, new, and patent pending.
1 - 3 of 3
Showing 20 items per page