Isn't Being a Wicked Woman Much Better? - Vol. 1 Ch. 31

[MangaDex]

 

[moblinsecret]

Wow that's such a villainess move, so extortionate

 

[Kaarme]

Damn, I didn't see this coming, and I almost feel ashamed of myself because of it. By now I should have known enough of her personality. This is actually a genius move, not only to make money continuously, utilising a system that already existed (the patent mechanism), but this actually means that nobody will get any silly ideas of drawing information out of her for free. Furthermore, just being a successful entrepreneur means a good boost to her personal fame, which is partially a different thing from her family background. She has to be taken seriously. If she just donated new techniques and information to the society, she would be like a saint, and people would keep expecting more from her, yet greedy nobles wouldn't value her at all aside from the new information. She would just be a tool.

I doubt it was her original intention, but it's quite funny it looked like the new technique was free at first, so lots of mages would try it and get used to it. They wouldn't anymore want to live without it. So, when they suddenly need to pay, they are more likely to pay than if they had never tried it in the first place due to the expenses. A free trial, you might say, only they didn't even know it was a limited trial.

 

[hina_sw]

LOL the patent and monthly subscriptions. Girl is using her modern day knowledge well

 

[FirenzeClipper]

Her next move should be to bundle the formulae into one large subscription, AND sell individual subscriptions to each formula.

Or have tiered subscriptions to some formula.

 

[halcer]

An isekai that uses actual everyday modern knowledge and not obscure information like making chocolate from scratch! Love the villainess move!

 

[outinthegardener]

Wow, magical rent-seeking. Isekai capitalism strikes again. I wonder what happens to her magical patent rights if she is killed. Suppose a subscriber learns a few new magic formulas, cancels their subscription, and kills her. Does that mean everyone can use the procedures for free afterward?

 

[ItsJustAName]

Patenting magic, and by extension patenting math. In just one chapter this world has turned from a somewhat standard nobility-centric isekai to a waking nightmare, god damn.

 

[Epic_GamerXD]

This going to be a seriously nightmare for that world, Imagine patenting a KNOWLEDGE that still can be more improved.

I mean like okay if it's 10-15 years of patent but if its a whole eternity until one of the Seymour descendant decided to stop the patent, it's truly is Capitalism.

 

[Cobaltzero]

Patenting magic, and by extension patenting math. In just one chapter this world has turned from a somewhat standard nobility-centric isekai to a waking nightmare, god damn.

Technically we do something similar.
The so called "illegal numbers". They're all prime numbers if I remember right.

 

[Romanaire]

I'm not sure how long can you realistically hold that patent. There would be too much pressure just by banning some houses from using it (a desition Debora already made) and if it's used for war (and magic seems to be a tool of war in this world) the royal house would take it by force, probably resulting in civil war. That's just number one of a thousand things wrong with that move.

 

[Someone2Love]

Wow, Deborah's revenge is vicious. What an incredibly smart move to patent her formulae.

Some people are asking how long the patents last. If it's similar to how the US patent system works, the patent lasts for 20 years. A long time for sure, but not forever. Until the patent expires, Deborah should have a complete monopoly over her formulas, and her subscription service.

 

[blaqhawq]

Should've gone the old cable route. Charge them a monthly subscription  plus ppv access for new formulas

 

[Wyrm]

Funny thing is that, in the real world where patents are enough of a nightmare, you can't patent maths or concepts.
She pushed the patent system even further into nightmarish territory than the real world.
True villainess move here.

 

[BayuAH]

Technically we do something similar.
The so called "illegal numbers". They're all prime numbers if I remember right.

Illegal number actual AACS encryption for DVD and Blu-ray Disc by Sony, which is 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0. They say that is a trade secret.¹

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¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_number

 

[chairlight]

I am so glad I was not eating or drinking while reading this chapter. I would either be choking, hacking my lungs out, or have stuff coming out of my nose(or all the above) That moment when he took Deborah's subscription model and made it into a drip feed with upcharge......man those two are really perfect for each other XD.

 

[ZeeVee]

Technically we do something similar.
The so called "illegal numbers". They're all prime numbers if I remember right.

Nope, some of them are prime numbers, or can be represented as prime numbers. (The Sony Blu-ray encryption key already mentioned above ends in 0 in hexadecimal, which means it is divisible by 16 and therefore is not even close to being prime.) A lot of the “illegal numbers” are just the contents of a file containing a computer program, represented as a large number rather than a sequence of bytes (any sequence of bytes is, after all, just a number in base 256, which can be converted to base 10 to be a modern-human-readable number), and since you can always add extra unnecessary steps/comment lines/whatever to a computer program, and most computer programs can in any case be written in multiple different ways, it’s always possible to force a program into a prime representation… although doing that might mean making the program much, much longer than it needs to be.

I feel bad for this fictional world, a modern-day real-life human is making it hellish by unleashing things the inhabitants were blissfully free of until that point. It’s like Greatest Estate Developer where the MC deliberately got humans addicted to high energy use (in the form of heated floors) and thus massive deforestation followed by fossil fuel dependency are the inevitable results — which he foresaw and did it anyway. He’s getting famous and rich and highly-praised in-story, but a few generations later everyone will be cursing his memory.

 

[ChocoPies]

Wow, magical rent-seeking. Isekai capitalism strikes again. I wonder what happens to her magical patent rights if she is killed. Suppose a subscriber learns a few new magic formulas, cancels their subscription, and kills her. Does that mean everyone can use the procedures for free afterward?

Honestly it's more likely the person would end up being lynched when someone even worse like the royal family manages to take the patent and charges 30 gold or something for it. Or Deborah's family keeps it but everyone is banned from using it.

 

[Kaarme]

I'm not sure how long can you realistically hold that patent. There would be too much pressure just by banning some houses from using it (a desition Debora already made) and if it's used for war (and magic seems to be a tool of war in this world) the royal house would take it by force, probably resulting in civil war. That's just number one of a thousand things wrong with that move.

It's not like Deborah would like her own country to lose a war. As a daughter of a high noble, she would likely get killed or taken by some old, ugly foreign noble if her home country collapsed. She could allow her technique to be used during the war, for military purposes, free of charge.

The thing about too much pressure you mentioned is not necessarily any problem. If you start fundamentally cracking the patent system, it means other patents may be void as well, making a whole lot of people suffer, plus discouraging future innovations. Deborah specifically could be targeted, but don't forget she belongs to one of the most important noble families in the country, so it wouldn't be easy to try to exclude her from patent protection. The kingdom could set a law that mana calculations can't be patented at all, with retroactive power, thus removing this patent, but that would ensure Deborah won't reveal anything new to the world in the future, which would be a big loss

 

[Verypeeved]

Dear god. In one fell swoop, she has become more vile than just about every villainess in any of these mangas...

Combined.

Jesus Christ, talk about jumping off the slippery slope. I dearly hope this blows up in her face big time, and she doesn't just Mary Sue her way past any of the obvious issues like so many of these villainesses do. If what she just did isn't destroyed utterly, and soon, she will have done infinitely more damage to this world than the original villainess ever could have in a thousand lifetimes, and for much worse reasons.

Christ, at least those Isekai protagonists that engage in slavery are just being part of the problem. She's gone out of her way to find whole new frontiers of despicable evil. I dearly hope that this plan of hers becomes an albatross around her neck.