[MURG] Uploading IP (intellectual property)

[Major]

cat13 at illrepute.org writes:

> If you're suggesting that a subset of the required research is done and
> kept proprietary, who will pick it up and do more?  Since it's proprietary,
> the only group that can further it is the group that started it, which
> leads to a single group funding the entirety of the project, which is not
> reasonable.

This is not true if by "proprietary" you mean the current patent
system or something like it.

If someone else has a patent on X, it is still perfectly feasible to
spend money developing Y which is dependent on X provided you can get
a license to use X. This sort of thing happens under the present
patent system all the time.

If by "proprietary" you meant trade secrets or something similar then
your point is perfectly valid, but that was not what the discussion
seemed to be to be about.

> > The costs of the whole project will be at least comparable to the
> > human genome project
> 
> I would think the costs would be orders of magnitude greater, but there
> are probably other people here far more qualified than me to provide an
> estimate.

At present prices the costs of *media* to store the first upload would
exceed the cost of the human genone project. We need massive (but
evolutionary and fundamentally easy) development in a number of
conventional technologies before we will have the infrastructure to do
the (revolutionary and difficult) job of scanning a brain.

Major