[IW] Ordinary Worlds with valuables!

[starslayer]

On Copycat

I think that some of you guys are radically overstating the effect of copywright and patent on medicine, research, and technology.

First, technology patents were not really a 'big deal' until the mid 90's, it was a landmark case when apple got to shut down the apple-clones, capacitor rot was caused by blatant copying of a Japanese capacitor manufacturer by multiple other companies- complete with full on theft of their secret-sauce formulation (which they purposely obfuscated, and the thieves did not realize producing a flawed copy) [1]

It is at least my opinion that basically all technology that exists here would also exist on copycat- because once you have it you can still rely on trade-secret, obfuscation, and the fact that you have the lab that can build the stuff to give you a period of exclusivity, and then hopefully brand-loyalty. These are all MUCH more tenuous of course, and corporate spying, reverse engineering, etc will be constant threats, but they give you a bit of exclusivity- likely enough to make your money back and then some if its a good product (and there will likely be horror stories where this is not the case).

As already mentioned most medical technology is patent/copywright free until the late 90s. Now you start seeing a few technologies which are patent encumbered like the really advanced surgical machines or FMRI devices.

Drugs are SUPER patent encumbered and have been for a while, but most nations force the drug companies to allow other companies to produce generics of there drugs today, and pharma companies still get profit hand over fist; so employing trade secret, tossing some red-hearings into the chemical composition to make reverse engineering harder, and having good branding that demonizes anyone who seems to be close to a copy of your product can likely get more than enough time to make drug research to pay off (heck it may actually be MORE effective than the current system that most of the world uses which forces them to allow generics; because the generic companies get to refer to the patent as a blueprint on how to build their own version of it).

[i]As an aside- drug research on our world today is hugely hampered by overaggressive and overlong patents- so much so that companies will patent a synthetic molecule with no research into what it actually does, and have huge libraries of these molecules in their patent libraries. When they have time they actually test a molecule or a combination of them to see if it has any effect, and if it does it moves on to multiple stages of testing, and then finally release a drug- but that drug was all but literally 'sitting in a closet' for who knows how long before someone got around to testing it. It would basically be impossible for someone to 'break into' pharma research today (unless they were in one of the patent ignoring nations like china), because inevitably whatever they make already exists in one of those patent libraries, or is a natural product/chemical.

Further- for real progressive inventions it really does not matter if everyone knows how you did it. No one builds intel clones not because intel owns patents (but they do, they own a LOT of patents), they CAN'T build them because intel owns the only chip fab that can produce intel-chips with 4nm bridges. Without patent you'd be able to build interoperability into your chip (So AMD could make their chips support PhysX, snapdragon could stick on an intel-graphic compatible accelerator, etc).

I would imagine that copycat can follow a largely similar technological progression that we see today, but the iteration cycles would be faster (and the subsequent 'new medicine costs' would be higher)- likely this would result in a much more permissive 'good enough to start selling with a warning label' view of consumer safety, and pharma companies would be VERY closed doors with their newest 'secret sauce'- but you'd also see a lot of philanthropic and humanitarian groups engaging directly in drug research by trying to modify existing drugs (since they would have no concerns about submarined by a phantom patent holder, and would not need a team of lawyers to make sure that what they are doing is ok).

The entertainment industry however would be so completely different than what we have today that it is not worth considering what 'copycats JRR Martin' because, really, he won't exist.

I can speculate that big entertainment will be made by big names (whoever the current shakespears are); but you can bet that if the big name ignores a section of media- someone else will fill the void. So 'true artists' will create new things, and 'make ends meet' artists will adapt those things to squeeze more money out of them (and most likely any given artist will be in both camps over their career).

I can further speculate that 'big entertainment' won't be nearly as big as it is on our earth or homeline- likely the concept of an 'entertainment studio that funds your project' will just be right out there, everyone will instead have a bigger piece of the pie on completed production, but have to be out of pocket until then (which will put a lot of the special effects we enjoyed from the 70s to the 2010 zone out of reach; but perhaps this would have accelerated CG/green screening/animation and other ways to get special effects without a huge budget that is sunk into material things)


[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague

[(E)]

Another idea that could work as a money maker, a dump world. Expensive to process radioactive waste material, extremely toxic chemicals, dangerous quarantined biological agents, hard to kill invasive species, even unwanted animal species that killing would cause bad press. While people wouldn't want to visit, it would be a bad place to get trapped. Who knows what has been generated by the interactions between what has been dumped. PCs could also be tasked with retrieving something that has been dumped by mistake.

[Flyndaran]

Even more interesting is if it was used as a dump by an ancient world hopping people. Unpredictable ecosystems as over time invasive and native species equalized and adapted in unique ways. Radiation and toxin pockets still exist, and perhaps with dangers unknown to IW.

[cptbutton]

Monocrop plantations on empty worlds and areas the crop is unknown on. No trouble with crop specific diseases or pests. Until some idiot brings them in.

[PTTG]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

Even more interesting is if it was used as a dump by an ancient world hopping people. Unpredictable ecosystems as over time invasive and native species equalized and adapted in unique ways. Radiation and toxin pockets still exist, and perhaps with dangers unknown to IW.

Imagine the team sent there to search for interesting artifacts. It'd be an excellent way to start a campaign of incompetent oddballs (who wastes the experts on digging through garbage?) who end up getting empowered by weird crap they find on a hell world.

[Kax]

Originally Posted by Tyneras

Any technology with a significant investment cost and long payoff period would be dead on arrival.

Unless a government got interested, and govt-backed medicine would be bigger than it is in our world.

There's a lot of stuff that's been developed by govt, esp stuff that's too big for any private enterprise to be willing to look at.

A lot has since been privatised, however. Rail everywhere, gas pipes in New York, water and electric utilities, a lot of medical advances, and so on.

Innovation won't be stopped, but it will be slowed by comparison and will have a different character--more infrastructure and medicine and science, far fewer consumer products.

[PTTG]

Here's one. It's a very near echo in date, the big difference being no secret. However，as a minor effect, Earth is rotated 180 degrees west of its position on equivalent worldlines, meaning that someone departing North America ends up in inner Asia and someone jumping from Australia arrives in South America (unless they're too far east).

What's the valuables? Traveling crosstime is on par with air freight for expense, and the echo is a common date. The result is that a homeline crosstime company can take an order for a few ton shipment in both worldlines, then instead of shipping the order overland, ship both of them to the complimentary worldline, and reap a quiet and effective profit thanks to impossibly fast apparent deliveries.

[starslayer]

Originally Posted by Kax

Unless a government got interested, and govt-backed medicine would be bigger than it is in our world.

There's a lot of stuff that's been developed by govt, esp stuff that's too big for any private enterprise to be willing to look at.

A lot has since been privatised, however. Rail everywhere, gas pipes in New York, water and electric utilities, a lot of medical advances, and so on.

Innovation won't be stopped, but it will be slowed by comparison and will have a different character--more infrastructure and medicine and science, far fewer consumer products.

I was actually just reminded of an interesting note about patents and medicine earlier today while reading the news: Insulin was the FIRST drug patent (1923), it was patented and then sold to the university of Toronto for $3 because a competitor was developing a product that Banting thought was inferior and would get people killed- so by effectively open sourcing the process he crashed the inferior competitor by opening the market to anyone who wanted to use his method- so at least in the drug world on copycat not a lot changes until after 1923

[Kax]

Originally Posted by starslayer

I was actually just reminded of an interesting note about patents and medicine earlier today while reading the news: Insulin was the FIRST drug patent (1923), it was patented and then sold to the university of Toronto for $3 because a competitor was developing a product that Banting thought was inferior and would get people killed- so by effectively open sourcing the process he crashed the inferior competitor by opening the market to anyone who wanted to use his method- so at least in the drug world on copycat not a lot changes until after 1923

And here's an example of govt inventions, not even getting into all the inventions that came our of the space programmes;

Just from CSIRO, the Australian government science labs:
•WiFi 802.11.
•Plastic banknotes.
•Equivac HeV: Hendra virus vaccine.
•Extended wear contact lenses.
•Aerogard. (bug repellant spray)
•Total Wellbeing Diet.
•RAFT polymerisation.
•BARLEYmax.
*Gene shears.
*The permanent pleat for fabrics
*Relenza flu drug
*Transparent carbon nanotube sheets
*Distance measuring equipment (DME) used for aviation navigation
*CSIRAC, the fifth electronic computer in the world, and the third programmable one.


Not everything comes from private inventors, and even less from corporate ones.

...to get a little off-topic. Apologies.

[Kax]

Originally Posted by Kax

And here's an example of govt inventions, not even getting into all the inventions that came our of the space programmes;

Just from CSIRO, the Australian government science labs:
•WiFi 802.11.
•Plastic banknotes.
< snip >
*Distance measuring equipment (DME) used for aviation navigation
*CSIRAC, the fifth electronic computer in the world, and the third programmable one.


Not everything comes from private inventors, and even less from corporate ones.

...to get a little off-topic. Apologies.

Actually, this leads to an alternate: what happens to the world with no wifi data connections? When a G2 phone connection is as good as it gets? Maybe ultrawideband becomes a thing.