People here be discussing the wrong thing, or am I the only one thinking that patenting a roll of paper is incredibly stupid?
It’s a damn roll of paper. How much of a genius do you have to be to come up with that? People have been doing it for millennia, the only difference is that it used to be so expensive that no one would think of whipping their butts with it.
The patent was the tp roll but more so the angular serations that terminate short of the center, so a tearable roll of paper rather than a strip role that had to be torn manually or cut
They are stupid, but helped inventors recoup development costs. It gets abused now, especially with patent trolls. The invention here moved TP from a roll you had to cut or tear, to self tearing segments with enough attached at center that it pulled roll forward…smart at the time…we take this idea of perforated sheets for granted now
Maybe this invention revolutionised how we clean our butts, or maybe it was utterly trivial and 20 different ways of cutting paper rolls were patented that same year (note that present day rolls don’t even use this method).
But that’s irrelevant to the point that seems to be implied here that patents somehow contributed to it’s success. They don’t, an invention will be useful or not based on its own merits, not on the fact they’re patented.
They exist to ensure whoever registered it makes a profit, which is why they’re being exploited way past the point of making up for any good they were supposed to bring…
lemmyshitpost
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