You haven’t provided a single source that backs up your claim. I will continue to talk with you once you did.

You haven’t provided any sources at all, you just ignored anything I said. So go, your turn. Post a source that says that transferring the patent to the university in 1923 was the wrong decision.

If you know better than the lawyers they consulted back then, prove it. Back it up with something more than just made-up hot air.

Obviously, the patent holders together with their legal council decided back then that it was the better choice because that’s what they did. Or are you argueing that it never happend because it’s on Wikipedia?

I did not run out of arguments, I posted a contemporary source that said everything I talked about all along.

While you keep repeating the same talking points that might maybe hold true today but certainly aren’t supported by anything contemporary. Repeating your points the same way all the time isn’t “having new arguments”. It’s “running out of arguments but not admitting to it”. And since you have been doing that in a loop for quite some time, there’s no point bringing new arguments apart from “a whole bunch of lawyers from the same time came to the same conclusion multiple times in a row”.

Tbh, I am surprised that you seem to know the exact legal situation in regards to patent law in Canada of 1923, and that you have such a strong opinion on that matter.

I would recommend you to read the corresponding Wikipedia secton where all the thinking that went into that decision is laid out quite well.

I would venture to say that legal experts of the time at the time understood the patent law of the time a little better than some random users on Lemmy.

Of course, but an university owning a patent gives them the responsibility to defend it, and also incentivizes them to do so.

That logic applies identically to a valid patent.

The difference is that in the case of transferring the patent to the university, there’s a legal department at the ready to defend the patent. The same is not the case for a disclaimed patent.

Nowadays you just google for other patents and done. But back then, I guess that searching for prior art was quite a lot more difficult. Gifting the patent to an university so that they defend open access to the patent sounds like a more reliable plan.

I mean, even nowadays patents are greenlit my patent offices even though there’s clear prior art (Nintendo’s recent patent for catching monsters in a ball in a game comes to mind, which Nintendo would have to have patented before publishing their first game with that mechanic around 30 years ago), and even today it’s really difficult and expensive to get such a clear nonsense patent invalidated.

So difficult that e.g. Palworld opted to change the mechanic instead of fighting the patent.

So I do understand why someone would instead gift the patent to an university under the condition that they keep access to it open, especially 100 years ago.

Remember, the 1920s is long ago. Giving the patent to the equivalent of a non-profit organisation was probably better than disclaiming it, since it’s easier to have one large, well-known entity that will fight off people trying to re-patent it than to disclaim it and hope that no patent clerk ever lets a fraudulent re-patent go through.

In 1920 you couldn’t just google for prior art when fighting a fraudulent patent.

They stopped eating meat 3 million years ago. That’s longer ago than the appearance of the first animal of the genus Homo.

Pandas stopped eating meat about 3 million years ago. That’s before the first being of the genus Homo appeared. Not Homo Sapiens (that was 300 000 years ago), but Homo Habilis (2.5mio years ago).

If evolution can take us from something that’s barely an ape to humans in that time frame, you’d expect that it can fix an omnivour’s digestive system to work with plants.

Google tells me that pandas started eating bamboo 6-8 million years ago and stopped eating meat 3 million years ago.

That’s not exactly recent.

For reference, the first Homo appeared 2.8 million years ago and the first Homo Sapiens 300 000 years ago.

The last common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees lived 5-10 million years ago.

So if evolution can evolve humans in that time frame, you’d expect that it could also adapt an omnivour to a herbivour.

Nature has proven over and over again that it doesn’t like neat categories :)

Evolution happens and it follows whatever works, and it certainly doesn’t care about any clever categories and rules we humans come up with.

The same holds true for a lot of animals. There aren’t many purely “vegan” animals. A horse will snack a mouse too if it gets the opportunity.

Pandas as well. Non-predator but clearly front facing eyes.

They sold the patent to the University of Toronto, so they didn’t exactly sell it to a for-profit patent troll.

But also, that was in 1923, so the patent has long since expired.

In the case of DNA, because it’s shared with relatives and descendants who might be still alive. In Hitler’s case, that might not be that much of an issue, but you were talking about dead people in general.

If your parents are dead, and thus they get DNA sampled, that information gained is good enough to positively identify DNA traces of all their children.

Remember how they caught the Golden State Killer? They put a DNA sample into the genetics website GEDmatch and found a few of his distant relatives. They then used publicly available family history records to construct a family tree that included all of these matches. That allowed them to narrow down the suspects to two people. One of them could be ruled out by DNA testing a close relative, which left the last one. They then took a DNA sample from his car, which was a match and that’s how they got him.

Using that kind of stuff to catch killers is likely a good use of the technology, but there’s quite a few nefarious things a state could do with a DNA database of all dead people.

Considering how important WASM is, I haven’t seen a single application of it.

WASM on the server seems especially weird since it’s not much more than a bytecode interpreter. At that point you could just use a JVM, maybe with some more cut-down API to make it more sandboxed.

… that’s what I was saying.

Because you can make explosives out of that.

And this is the whole point of the controversy: The same word can have multiple meanings in different contexts and some people have trouble with that concept.