There was once a time when an actual working prototype had to be submitted to gain a patent. This "having your cake and eating it too" issue was why such a cumbersome requirement existed.
There are companies out there who do not know why a particular product works as well as it does. Those companies can still get a patent that does not describe the invention in a way that would allow someone to reproduce the desirable attributes of that product. They then can sue any smarter companies that actually can figure out the secret.
I never thought about this benefit to a patent system. Thank you.
Then government process change and today patent has changed. The ability to copy a invention from a patent is for all practical purposes impossible and in general no one objects to that fact. As the joke goes the only invention invention that the patent office will demand to be able to copy is one that breaks the third law of thermodynamics.
For hardware, I think I agree, but I doubt patents could be used to actually build something.
The bar should be very high to get a patent and it should only cover the most novel and unique algorithms out there.
Idiotic stuff like a "one click purchase" button or "do it on a computer" should be thrown in the trash immediately.
Pretty much all of our patent problems could be solved in all industries by simply raising the bar for what is considered non-obvious to those familiar with the craft and substantially different to what is already out there.
The "archive that people maybe start looking at 20 years later" might be worth something. I wonder, though, if similar or greater benefits might be gotten by encouraging companies to dump their secrets (or parts thereof) into some archive where they will remain heavily encrypted and guarded for a few decades.
The case for patents needs to be made empirically -- lets see where they actually drove innovation. In general you will see massive innovation as soon as a patent expires.
An invention exploding throughout the world upon the expiry of a patent is the primary feature of patents, not evidence that patents are bad. The whole point of patents is that after a brief monopoly period, the entire invention - detailed in the patent to a level sufficient to recreate it from scratch - becomes the public's to use.
Your example is evidence of patents successfully driving progress everywhere and working as intended.
I'd much rather things protected by trade secrets had been protected by patent instead. If that was the case, for example, I could buy coca-cola for the price of the store brand. But I can't, because the formulas are still secret and not held by the public, even after more than 100 years. The formula being secret serves only to benefit an entrenched multinational corporation and reduce competition - rewarding neither the public nor the original inventor.
Patents have a long history of abuse and very little evidence that they drive innovation. The case has to be made that their benefit outweighs their harm. My argument is that it doesn't.
As tofof said, that’s absolutely the entire point of the patent system. The original inventor (Watt?) patented his invention. For a period of time, he could use it exclusively. And then the patent expires and everyone gets to use it. Everyone wins.
Let's take Google's PageRank as an example.
Until PageRank, search engines tried to decipher the content of a page to decide the value of that page in a relevant search. PageRank took the value of page links as THE defining metric of quality and the result was a much better search engine.
Had Google kept this a trade secret, we'd still be guessing at how they accomplished the goal. Knowing what they did, and how they did it, means that the knowledge is available to everyone.
For a non-search related project we are doing, I directed on of our team members to read the PageRank algorithm, as it is somewhat informative of a potential solution to one of our problems.
Google patenting PageRank has meant that we get the value of knowing their process, but are unable to use it to compete with them.
I think an easier way to solve this is to use something like torrents, and have the USPTO sign the data being sent out with a known public-private key pair (So you can verify that what you're being sent isn't just junk someone generated). These can get copied by anybody who connects to the network, verified that they are actual patents, and then when the USPTO distibutes the encryption key anyone with a copy can decrypt them. In this situation, there's no such thing as a 51% attack because there is no history to rewrite, and you can't dump fake patents into the system to attempt to 'overload' it without having the USPTO's private key. An effort could be made to delete some information by simply refusing to replicate it (And hoping others also refuse), but as long as someone has a copy there isn't anything an outside force could do to cause them to delete it if they don't want too, and if someone makes enough of an effort someone else should be able to replicate it.
*This is a terrible idea
It is hard to keep a secret. Even the most closely guarded ones (the atom bomb, for instance) tend to eventually leak. That, and many devices can be reverse engineered.
Given that intentional infringement awards are trebled, plaintiffs have a huge incentive to accuse defendants of it. If any patent attorneys are reading this, can you cite any statistics regarding what percentage of cases end up with a finding of intentional infringement?
The point of patents is that we don’t want corporations guarding trade secrets, we want them to make their secrets public so that others can benefit from them. And in exchange, they get some time where nobody else can use it.
Getting rid of patents will just lead to trade secrets getting lost, like so many have been through history.