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The secrecy section is interesting. The new web vanguard (thinking of Google and Facebook primarily) is motivated to shrug off, if not outright undermine, the
by saturdaysaint 15y ago
The secrecy section is interesting. The new web vanguard (thinking of Google and Facebook primarily) is motivated to shrug off, if not outright undermine, the patent system precisely because many of their most valuable assets are hidden and very difficult to reverse engineer, let alone patent. Their main assets aren't user-facing features or UI conventions - they're distinguished by hidden stores of data and advanced algorithms and tools for which few of their employees have complete source code access.
- bfe 15y agoThis is a great point and I've seen it in action many times among clients - calculating whether to apply for a patent on a new idea or to protect it as a trade secret. In cases where the value is mainly in inaccessible firmware or a manufacturing process where it would be hard for someone to reverse engineer, and even harder to detect if someone did manage to copy it, they typically set up procedures to keep it as a trade secret. The other side to this, that I've seen among clients, is they really do often make decisions whether to devote money to developing a technology based on the expectation of whether they'll be able to patent it.