This is going in circles. You cannot patent something without disclosing it. So, either Qualcomm has a patent, and it isn't secret, or they don't have a patent (nor can they ever, after 18 months) and the argument is moot.
Yes, but then software patents should require you to release a full reference implementation with full documentation under a free (BSD, MIT) license as soon as the patent runs out.
Currently, they don't release it at all.
Additional regulation I'd like to see: Any neural networks trained based on data of users have to be completely public domain. If Google wishes to train recaptcha, they should either pay for people to train it, or give back to the public the value that the public created.
Why not as soon as the patent is granted?
edit: you might bring up clean room engineering that AMD did in the 80s. Intel weren't effected, and are bigger than ever. And the pace of innovation is massive.
The date that matters for trade secrets with respect to patentability is the date that they are first published or offered for sale. I don't believe offering a binary for sale counts as offering the trade secret for sale, but insert usual disclaimer.
Why should you or anyone else get to decide on how Qualcomm is monetising the product of their investment?
Qualcomm spent millions on developing this, nobody else should be able to decide this.
> 4. As you said, the sauce is secret. I think the question of whether Qualcomm should be permitted to keep the sauce secret and how much the law should help or hinder this secrecy is worthy of at lease some debate.
It is Qualcomm's property, they can keep it secret or open source it however they decide. I deeply reject the idea that government should have the right to order us to share our private property with the public.
Mostly I agree with you, but I think it is worth noting that this discussion is in the context of patent protection for software.
One of the requirements of applying for a patent is providing a reference implementation - I believe this is what the parent was referring to when they mentioned whether or not Qualcomm should be "permitted to keep the sauce secret".
I said no such thing. I said that Qualcomm could do this, not that they must or that they should be required to.
>> 4. As you said, the sauce is secret. I think the question of whether Qualcomm should be permitted to keep the sauce secret and how much the law should help or hinder this secrecy is worthy of at lease some debate. > > It is Qualcomm's property, they can keep it secret or open source it however they decide. I deeply reject the idea that government should have the right to order us to share our private property with the public.
I don't think the government should, in general, require Qualcomm do share this secret sauce. But it just might be worth considering whether the government should require that the secret sauce that runs enormous numbers of devices (read: extremely high-value target if someone can break or pwn many of them) on wireless spectrum (which is a shared resource!) should be opened to independent auditors and security researchers as a precondition of being granted a license to operate on public spectrum.
Like I said, I think it's worthy of at least some debate.
Because Qualcomm is riding the coat-tails of a government-issued investment protection? You can't argue for anti-free-trade policies by using free trade arguments.
For the sake of argument, if Qualcomm had no such connection to the government and has created it's products entirely from private funds, why should the government or other third parties have a right to dictate their product?
There's certainly short supply of the secret sauce in Qualcomm's baseband.
Your team spent millions building it, and, in order to give a sufficient incentive for teams to do similar things to that, the law should probably give some protection so that Qualcomm can make a profit from it. But you're conflating a bunch of things here:
1. Qualcomm knows the product and has the engineers. Qualcomm is uniquely positioned to build usable reference implementations, chips, etc, and to charge for this service and for support. This requires no legal protection whatsoever.
2. Qualcomm holds copyright on the code base. This has nothing to do with patent law, and I think that very few people would dispute that copyright makes sense in this context. (Whether long-term copyright makes sense is a different story altogether. I tend to think that a decade or two would be more than enough to make Qualcomm's investment worthwhile enough that they would do it.)
3. Qualcomm holds lots of patents that prevent other people from spending the same millions of dollars to develop a competing product without taking significant risk of being sued. I, and many others, think that the law should not offer Qualcomm this protection.
4. As you said, the sauce is secret. I think the question of whether Qualcomm should be permitted to keep the sauce secret and how much the law should help or hinder this secrecy is worthy of at lease some debate.