I remember reading that the idea behind patents was to improve the knowledge transfer that trade secrets didn't offer. In exchange for a temporary exclusivity r

I remember reading that the idea behind patents was to improve the knowledge transfer that trade secrets didn't offer. In exchange for a temporary exclusivity right, you are required to make public your discoveries and advancements. The article went further into how trade secrets allowed a company to have its employees sign non disclosures and actually sue the employee and whoever else used the employer's "stolen" knowledge in criminal court, while patents changed this to be only civil and prevented employees from being sued at all. As everything in life, a balance between the two is probably the most optimal. So I agree patents might have started going too far one way, but I doubt trade secrets would be any better in addressing OP's complaint that patents prevent the free transfer of knowledge and limits innovation. While I never lived when trade secrets were the norm, I believe most people supporting it in favor of patents suffer from the same problem a lot of younger programmers suffer from. We keep reinventing the wheel and making the same mistakes over and over. It's all a cycle, we'll go back to trade secrets and then their issues will become more "apparent", people will have forgotten the inherent issues with patents and we'll move back to patents again, repeating the cycle. So I personally disagree with both, you rarely solve issues by reverting back to older ways which the people before us had already tried in vain. We have to try something else, maybe a hybrid, maybe something totally different.