That's a ridiculous argument. Google has patented way more than this (most recently all kinds of recurrent nets for sequences). As long as these patents belong to alphabet they 're dangerous. Google could have set up a nonprofit for them if they really cared. What if google is bought out in 5 years? What if they get real competition and decide to go full evil?
These patents are overly broad, overly premature. They should never have been granted in the first place.
I think the NN pioneers who are first names in these patents should set up a nonprofit themselves. Hopefully many of them still seem to believe in the ethic of science , having lived decades in which nobody cared about NNs
Google is not the only company who accumulated a patent portfolio to be used defensively. If they start suing people they can expect to be sued back. It would also potentially ruin Google's relationship with other companies who would be reluctant to work with them if it could lead to a chance to be sued: e.g. If you sell some technology to Google to use they can discover that it has something that looks like something that they patented, which is enough grounds to sue you. This is too much risk for companies who don't have the money to mount a legal defense, even if they don't actually violate any patents.
The current state is sort of a patent cold war where both sides have weapons but they don't use them. So we get the advantages of patents (disclosure) without many of the potential disadvantages.
That's one of the most stupid politically correct ideas of the modern times. Thinking descendants of perpetrators owe anything to descendant of victim fails to account that, in most cases, the victims would actually have done the same than th eperpetrators had they be in the similar position of power (see slavery / natives vs europeans). It's bullshit. It's human nature that people abuse people. It's never a race/ people / specific group issue.
Justice isn't a soppy feel-good, everybody hug now thing. As the quote says, it's about the method of escaping the cycles of history. Of course descendants can't be blamed for the past, and that's not what anybody is saying. It might not be fair but the only way we can build a more peaceful future is by taking responsibility for the past. I can understand how that sounds similar to taking the blame, but it's fundamentally different.
Eg; I sure as hell didn't write the buggy code that brought down the production site. I can shout all I want that I don't owe anything to the clients, or I can just take responsibility for the fix and we all move on with our lives.
It's not a "problem". elsevier has been creating actual value for years. It's becoming a problem now precisely because we think they are creating more problems than value.
It's always the value market which dictates what happens. Even a dictator has provide values for enough people (not necessarily its citizen) to stay in power.
It's still a problem. Each individual scientists is better off short-term, in terms of their own career advancement, if they support Elsevier (by publishing with them), even though they'd be much better off longer-term if they all stopped supporting Elsevier.
Markets do love this sort of thing; this is one way of capturing customers and extracting money from them, whether they like it or not.
My point is just that you have to weight the cost: it provided tremendous value through the system of journals, while not really giving a "real" drawback since everyone in research who has ever wanted to get a given paper in the past 5 decades has been able to find it despite the locking by trying hard enough to bypass it.
i don't even understand the downvotes: i don't agree with the system and Elsevier can die but my point is just that they never were a really tangible "problem". Mostly a "1rst world problem".
Well, they became a problem due to their firm control over the system where they mostly profit from work that others do for them for free.
If scientists write the content and other scientists review it, merely publishing the results of that process shouldn't cost that much. Elsevier is extracting a lot of value from the work of others, and locking the results of that work up.
The act of publishing does add value, but not nearly as much as the researcher and reviewer have added, and yet Elsevier takes ownership of it all, because they happen to be sitting in a position of power built on that work done by others.
