3 ms·

I do have a naive question. Suppose a big breakthrough comes out of a private company, and such innovation is necessary to use nuclear fusion. The company wil

• crusso 9y ago
  If they have a patentable breakthrough, they would be able to restrict use of their discovery for the duration of their patent.
• jccooper 9y ago
  Patent law generally recognizes the option of the state to enforce compulsory licensing, though it's rarely exercised. Eminent domain may also be used to take patents. The modern approach seems to be to just let people find a way around the patent, or simply ignore and litigate.
• dekhn 9y ago
  yep. They could keep it a trade secret (no patent), patent it and not license it, or patent it and license it so others could use it under some terms. This only matters for the life of the patent, and is consistent with the intent of patents.
• ekun 9y ago
  It probably also depends on funding they have received from places like the Department of Energy and contracts they have signed for their research being publicly available, but if Paul Allen is the funding and not the government maybe it's all private. My own naivety would say billionaires investing in clean technology would share it with the world, but who knows?
• markvdb 9y ago
  A related economics question, a thought experiment really... Suppose a private company manages to lower the cost of electric energy by 90%, using a device self produced fast with virtually no capex. From an economics point of view, they build free money printing presses, essentially. How would they benefit from this the most possible? Selling the energy? At what price? Take over sectors of the economy where electric price generates most added value? Aluminium production? Data centers? ...
  • DennisP 9y ago
    With costs that low, it'd make sense to replace even brand-new fossil plants just to save the cost of fuel. You could eliminate fossil fuels for electricity production in a very short period of time. Selling the energy mostly wouldn't make sense, since it means replacing regulated utilities. You could sell the reactors themselves but you'd have to be good at scaling up factories fast; unless that's a core competency you'll probably make money faster by licensing to people who are good at it. Or, just outsource the manufacturing. Either way, if you can churn out lots of reactors fast, just sell them to everyone. Don't bother trying to take over e.g. aluminum production; what do you know about producing aluminum? How long will it take you to learn? Just sell the reactor to the aluminum producer.
• dokem 9y ago
  It's worth noting that other countries would be free to copy the technology. At some point the government may intervene.
• njarboe 9y ago
  Many new technologies take twenty years or more to move from research discovery to commercial application. For example high temperature superconductors (HTS) were discovered in 1986. The Holbrook Superconductor Project in 2008 is what is cited as the first major commercial use of HTS. A few other power projects using HTS are being constructed and HTS is starting to see some use in specialty magnets. How much 20 year patents slow down scientific development is highly debated but most companies try hard to have more than one supplier for anything critical to their business. These companies will tend to avoid having anything patented by some other company in their products.