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> Isn't this the system working as designed? If you want your thing to be protected, you've got to keep improving and refining it. When your 20-year old product
by mcphage 3y ago
> Isn't this the system working as designed? If you want your thing to be protected, you've got to keep improving and refining it. When your 20-year old product is competitive with today's product, you lose your patent protection.
Not really—the point of patents is to publish information so that others can use it after a period of exclusivity. But if you can keep filing patents, preventing others from using that information indefinitely, then it defeats the purpose of the patent system.
- toast0 3y agoIf you can keep filing new patents, and the new patents are so important that the old patents are worthless, then you're improving the product space tremendously. If you look at video compression, by the time a patented algorithm expires, there's tended to be a new codec that's better, but you can use mpeg-2 as you like now. So we get the incentive to make better codecs, and we get the old codecs.
- mcphage 3y agoIf it makes your old patent worthless, because your new stuff is so much better, that’s fine. If it makes your old patent worthless, because it’s hard to use your old patent without running afoul of your new patent, because they’re overlap too much—that’s not working as intended.