4 ms·

This is cool. We should require anyone with patents on IP to open source the trade secrets that go along with them when they come off of patent.

majewsky 3y ago
What you're proposing is how patents are supposed to work. The original proposition is that you get time-limited legal protection in exchange for putting your invention in the commons. Of course this has been subverted e.g. by trash patents esp. in the software area where the description just says the equivalent of "magic happens here" on step 17.
- kiba 3y ago
  It doesn't require trash patents. It just require engineers turned entrepreneurs wasting their time in court trying to enforce claim or testifying on behalf of their investors to enforce claim. Time spent in court is time not spent on engineering. Even if these entrepreneurs were successful, now you have a 20 years monopoly. That's not without cost to the economy at large. That's even assuming patents are necessary to disclose secrets. We have companies that specialize in benchmarking and reverse engineering products. Then why are the hell we need patents as soon as the product is available on the market and someone can duplicate it? If you have trade secrets to protect, why the hell would you leak it and hope that the arduous process of enforcing your patent claims would pay itself back? Lawyers are expensive.
Aurornis 3y ago
I think you're confounding patent and copyright. To patent something, you must disclose it publicly. Trade secrets are kept secret, but as a result can't be patented. At least not directly. IP can be copyrighted, but it doesn't have to be patented. Copyright lasts much longer than patent protection. There's no practical way of determining which trade secrets "go along with" patents because that could describe literally everything the company does. It wouldn't make sense to force companies to reveal all of their secrets or surrender their copyrights as soon as their first patent expires.
- iancmceachern 3y ago
  Yeah, but the detail is that pragmatically in pur current system the patents, as they are written, do not generally provide enough information or detail to replicate many complex systems. You could have a patent and still be a decade away from making something that works, if you have the design data, the cad files, the assembly instructions, the travelers and manufacturing documentation, that all makes is considerably shorter. That's the gap the original commenter and I are highlighting.

majewsky 3y ago

What you're proposing is how patents are supposed to work. The original proposition is that you get time-limited legal protection in exchange for putting your invention in the commons. Of course this has been subverted e.g. by trash patents esp. in the software area where the description just says the equivalent of "magic happens here" on step 17.

kiba 3y ago
It doesn't require trash patents. It just require engineers turned entrepreneurs wasting their time in court trying to enforce claim or testifying on behalf of their investors to enforce claim. Time spent in court is time not spent on engineering. Even if these entrepreneurs were successful, now you have a 20 years monopoly. That's not without cost to the economy at large. That's even assuming patents are necessary to disclose secrets. We have companies that specialize in benchmarking and reverse engineering products. Then why are the hell we need patents as soon as the product is available on the market and someone can duplicate it? If you have trade secrets to protect, why the hell would you leak it and hope that the arduous process of enforcing your patent claims would pay itself back? Lawyers are expensive.

Aurornis 3y ago

I think you're confounding patent and copyright. To patent something, you must disclose it publicly. Trade secrets are kept secret, but as a result can't be patented. At least not directly. IP can be copyrighted, but it doesn't have to be patented. Copyright lasts much longer than patent protection. There's no practical way of determining which trade secrets "go along with" patents because that could describe literally everything the company does. It wouldn't make sense to force companies to reveal all of their secrets or surrender their copyrights as soon as their first patent expires.

iancmceachern 3y ago
Yeah, but the detail is that pragmatically in pur current system the patents, as they are written, do not generally provide enough information or detail to replicate many complex systems. You could have a patent and still be a decade away from making something that works, if you have the design data, the cad files, the assembly instructions, the travelers and manufacturing documentation, that all makes is considerably shorter. That's the gap the original commenter and I are highlighting.