Please remember that patents were invented as a way to fight trade secrets.

A patented invention should be described in sufficient detail, and the description is made public. This is how important inventions do not get hidden form sight forever, even if they don't bring any profit.

This also allows people (including governmental agencies) have an idea of what is being sold as a new invention. Would you take a new medicine whose chemical formula is a tightly guarded secret?

I think that what makes a patent worth it is the first-mover advantage. What makes a patent problematic is a long expiration time which does not depend on its being used productively.

The best idea I saw is an exponential patent fee. Say, first year it's $100, second, $400, third, $1600 (all amounts acceptable even for a lone-wolf inventor), ... tenth, $26M, ... fifteenth, $27B.

This way any useful invention can enjoy a patent coverage for some time, and afford it for some more time if it's bringing in significant profits, but sitting on a patent for a long time would be impossible even for the richest companies. Keeping a portfolio of unused patents would become pointless, too, and patent trolling, likely unprofitable.

Patents have suffered a fate similar to something like metrics that have succumbed to Goodhart's law.

Patents could've worked somewhat originally, at least in principle, but soon people started gaming the system, rendering the patent system worthless. Except for maybe certain domains patents do not currently host important inventions in the meaningful sense. Especially in software, execution matters much more than the actual idea.

And the execution part usually is akin to a trade secret: for example, it's not so much what Google and Amazon do, it's about the mountain of work they did in building all that and also making it scale. That's the non-trivial part that you couldn't replicate even if you read and bought all their patents.

A low-hanging fruit of fixing the patent system would be to reduce it to a mere notary service of timestamping ideas. Establishing the patent de facto would require the patent to be defended in courts: this alone would cut down the amount of bogus patents.

Defending a complex, vague system would cost a lot of money, balancing the usefulness of gaining a court-verified monopoly on the idea. On the other hand, a simple but truly novel idea would be rather easy to defend, even for a private person. There's no downgrade to the current state of matters: it's not as if the current patent system would allow individual inventors a low-cost way to sue and win big companies trying to abuse their patents already.

There are other ways but in any case gains need to be balanced with cost, that's the only way to make people and companies prioritise and valuate the true worth of their ideas. No party is going to spend a lot of money trying to defend a vague patent that was written only to win the first-to-file race and game its coverage within the patent system. They already know it's bollocks.

>A low-hanging fruit of fixing the patent system would be to reduce it to a mere notary service of timestamping ideas. //

The law says you can't get a patent for an idea. Which is right, ideas are cheap.

It sounds more like you're problem is "insufficiency" of the disclosures. No need to throw the computer away because one stick of RAM doesn't work.

> A patented invention should be described in sufficient detail, and the description is made public. This is how important inventions do not get hidden form sight forever, even if they don't bring any profit.

And the problem is that the patents of today do their best to be as vague as possible (in order to maximize the "area under patent"), while either being obvious or not revealing sufficient details for one to recreate the patented invention from the patent. Not to mention that patents lengths are not in line with exponential rate of progress.

So if they already fail at the functions they were created for, how worse are they from trade secrets? Maybe what we should do is not only get rid of patents, but also reduce protections around trade secrets? People will keep trying to make money anyway, this will still lead to inventions, but that way, at least society will get to make use of those inventions.

(Drug research is an exception I'm not sure how to handle, though.)

Yeah, a patent should only be granted if the patent officer manages to build a working prototype using it as a guide. A competing patent officer should only get the title of the patent and try the same, to check for obviousness.

I partially agree. It's not feasible to expect the patent examiner to reduce a technology to practice, primarily because a lot of physical technology requires very expensive equipment and some skill to master (chemical vapor deposition chambers for thin films for instance). The ownus should be on the applicant. However, it is certainly feasible for an inventor to demonstrate a working prototype for each claim. Based on the number of rediculous awarded patents I've reviewed over the years, I imagine simply requiring demonstration will probably reduce the number of patent applications by 90%.

This requirment would have many benefits. However, a down side is that not all entities have the resources to build their inventions. If I come up with a new idea for an efficient rocket engine, I would have to license the idea to a SpaceX, etc, to get it built. But it would be difficult to approach a SpaceX and secure a license without first getting a patent.

You will need the resources to build it eventually. You can easily protect yourself from an individual entity stealing your ideas using a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA).

Not always, but in general, a proof of concept prototype (built in parts, at small scale, or simulated) will be an order of magnitude cheaper than a production unit.

Would a white paper for a free energy generator be accepted to a respected peer reviewed journal? Probably not, but there are tons of these truely worthless granted patents out there diluting the system. I strongly believe we need inventors to prove their claims via demonstration, one way or another.

Drug research seems more like an infrastructure thing more than a profit thing. Fund the research publicly. Academic competition is enough to ensure research is effective.

Drug manufacture however seems more like a profit thing. Open up the results for companies to make generics. Profit motive will ensure efficient delivery.

Drugs are rarely (if ever?) developed by academics, and cost a huge amount. Low estimates for bringing a new drug to market are around $500M+:

They found that companies took an average of 7.3 years to win FDA approval, at a median cost of $648 million. Only two drugs had research costs over $1 billion. Adding in the cost of capital at 7 percent increased the median research and development cost to $757 million—less than a third of the Tufts estimate.[1]

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/03/drug-pric...

I agree that the pharmaceutical industry spends a lot researching drugs. And so does the government eg [1].

In the situation of an imaginary future where patents are scrapped, pharmaceutical companies will be unlikely to continue to invest in the current fashion. I took GP to suggest that this would be an issue. I was trying to make the point that tax payers through something like NIH grants would be to take up the slack. Making the research available patent free so that generics can be manufactured.

Obviously this wouldn't be a simple transition and incredibly unlikely. But its an interesting intellectual exercise to think about.

[1](https://www.statnews.com/2018/02/12/nih-funding-drug-develop...)

You also need to add the costs of the losers.

Indeed, the next paragraph in that article discusses that.

Except that idea is simply historically untrue. Patent were started primarily as a way to modernize the guild monopolies that were common place at the time, but were unsuited given the greater levels of globalization and international trade.

The idea that they were meant to serve as a way to reduce trade secrets falls flat in the face of the fact that most places with strong patent and copyright law, also have strong laws protecting trade secrets

You are correct when you are talking about the origin of British patent law. There a king could grant a patent for a wide range of monopolies, including practicing a particular craft only by guild members, etc.

The US patent law, which I referred to, is not as old, and it definitely talked only about inventions, and explicitly required drawings, explanations, etc to be made available: [1]

[1]: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Page%3AUnited_States_Statutes...

Given that american patent law was created originally as a copy of british patent law, through the statute of Anne, that distinction is irrelevant or even misleading.

The idea of exponentially increasing patent costs has a major issue: not all businesses are alike. If I make a new model of fork and patent it, I can probably enter the market quickly. However, if my patent is for some new type of power plant, I will not be able to enter market within 20 years.

Refutal: raise the cost differently depending on time to enter the market?

Then some statistician will have to be paid to estimate this, meaning patent applications are much more expensive.

I hope you think my comment was constructive.

But the people preparing to build a power plant, drawing up plans say, or doing tooling, would be doing "contributory infringement". The bank that funded it would be co-liable, which is great for the patent holder if they want a payday.

isnt this already an issue with the current system too? Patents all have the same minimum cost and same minimum effective legal cost, even though some opportunities are large and some are small. I understand your criticism but I think, if properly fleshed out and part of a larger plan, some sort of exponential cost feature could be useful.

That's why SpaceX does not file any patents. It would be like handing its recipe book to its competitors.

One of the most sensible and workable solutions I have heard to the cluster-fuck otherwise known as the patent system.. and this is why nothing will ever become of it.

> Please remember that patents were invented as a way to fight trade secrets.

Does anything in the early history of patents backs the assertion that they were invented for that reason?

"Patents might be useful as a way to fight trade secrets", is not the same thing, and could even be true enough; I think "patents were invented because..." might be a back-port of more recent thinking on to a history that does not support it.

>Please remember that patents were invented as a way to fight trade secrets.

Its becoming less and less and issue these days. Top secret product frequently leaks. Reverse engineering becoming better and better. Good luck keeping thing secrets, the cost will be higher and higher.

But we still have draconian protection for trade secrets. We still have products on the shelves of the grocery store with secret formulas. If patents are a substitute, then why not abolish the legal framework for protecting trade secrets?

It's hard to limit trade secrets without severely limiting the freedom of contract.

You can still get an FDA approval for secret-formula products; a good example is Coca-Cola.

With gas chromatography and mass spectrometry, is it possible to have a secret formula these days?

Yes, those tell you what the end product is, not the actual recipe to get that. And they tell you limited information, since they tend to decompose complex compounds that are unstable when vaporized.

What does criminal law have to do with "freedom of contract"? This is why "libertarian" has become a dirty word for a lot of people who used to be sympathetic.

You can be sent to prison for 15 years for trade secret infringement. It is criminal under both federal and most states' laws.

https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/trade-secret-basics-...

100% agree to dismantle patents entirely. They are a hindrance rather than a benefit in today's economy. Show me one small-time developer who earned a little more money by enforcing license fees when Big Corp would otherwise have scooped their idea up, and I'll show you 20 bullshit cases out of the Eastern District of Texas that literally prevent innovating in entire categories of software. It's time to end patents and this bottom-feeding exploitation of the legal system.

Are you against software patents, or all patents? Patents cover a lot more than software.

They also cause problems for a lot more than software too. I'm not 100% sure that (non-software) patents should be completely abolished, but as just one example of another industry that is harmed by patents, in the medical industry, there is very little incentive to research non-patentable treatments, because getting a monopoly from a patent is so much more profitable. The other argument is that patents provide considerable incentives for certain kinds of medical research. I'm not sure what the solution is there, but I do know the current system is very flawed.

Weren’t patents initially created for the pharmaceutical industry? The issue being that research is so prohibitively expensive that if you can’t benefit from being first then you are screwed?

Another similar industry is aero space but they mostly work by secrecy. This is not viable in pharma where I believe more transparency is required for safety.

No, patents was not created for the pharma industry. It is however the industry which would be the most disrupted by a patent abolishment. They would need a new government sponsored model to replace the current one. This to offset the costs that medical trial requirements create, which is the main cost of developing new medicines.

If we want safe meds we need to pay for the safety somehow. But that price needn't affect every other industry.

Indeed, and a government regulated system would be much fairer for everyone. In most western societies (the US may be a partial exception) we don't want to see people dying in the streets, therefore there is universal basic healthcare for everyone in every civilized country.

Therefore, it would be much better to fund it like, e.g., high energy physics research.

Do the research funded by governments, and the pure production of patent-free medicine can be done by the industry who, compete on price at a set and defined quality.

Patents predate the pharmaceutical industry by a few centuries. Even back then, I doubt the initial motivation for government-issued monopolies was to advance the apothecary industry.

The US switched over from NTSC to ASTC broadcast television in 2009. To build an ASTC digital television or converter box, you basically have to be in the MPEG LA patent pool, or the members can bankrupt you with licensing fees if you attempt to comply with the standard.

Edit: acronym typo. Thanks mnw21cam.

NSTC -> NTSC. There's an easy to remember mnemonic. Never Twice the Same Colour.

We also have really simple prevention/treatment steps for basically all chronic disease: sleep for eight hours every night, replace sugar with vegetables, and get outside and exercise.

If everyone did that, we wouldn't need all these fancy new drugs.

Are you seriously suggesting that people with serious genetic disorders (physical or mental) should just make better lifestyle choices, and they'll get better?

Totally agree.

- there is very little evidence that patents are beneficial

- there is a ton of very evident cases like this where patents are just used to rent-seek or destroy

- patents are collected by companies to inhibit competition across industries. Imagine if Intel, Nvidia, AMD, ARM, etc were actually threatened by competition from newcomers

- patents are the government giving a monopoly on using certain information. Information should be free

If there were no patents everyone would be busy working to implement ideas. Innovation would fly and the inequality index would drop like a rock. A lot of the wealth concentrated at megacorps in the form of IP would flow out to any who worked to actually implement ideas. Information cannot be stolen, it can only be copied. The literal definition of theft is to deprive someone of their property. That just doesn't apply to anything information based. There are several claimed intents but at its root it is an excuse to use violence against others to prevent competition, basically the one thing that shouldn't be allowed in civilization.

In general you need resources to go to market. John Doe makes a new widget goes to CompanyA with his invention, CompanyA just copy it. John gets nothing, CompanyA gets the profits.

How is that good?

Same way it works right now - John Doe forms a company, gets it on Kickstarter, YC, whatever, gobs VC money, then sells his company to CompanyA. Everyone gets profit.

What's not to like and where are patents in this picture?

Patents in general and as originally intended are beneficial: the concept was created to incentivise publishing innovations, to promote progress and state of the art.

Patents in software space are an abomination.

The solution is actually easy, and AFAIK has been at one time in the books too. Require a physical prototype with the submission. But I would go further. We should also require that the information in the patent, and any publicly available resources it references are together sufficient to replicate the prototype build.

If the rebuild cannot produce the same results as the application claims, then the entire application is invalid. (This limits the incentive for patent claims to be overly broad.)

Want to patent a process improvement? Fine, submit the description, the claims, the prototype implementing the improvement - and the accurate build instructions to replicate the design.

Think your setup would be too costly due to the requirement of the physical prototype? Works as intended: now you have an extra incentive to improve the invention to the point where it is actually useful and cost-effective.

And if the cost of submission due to prototype requirement prevents you from submitting for a patent in the first place? Excellent, the cost of entry is already high enough. Now you have to keep innovating to maintain your competitive edge, because there is no patent moat to prevent competition in an obviously expensive, potentially high-margin field.

The last one may sound like a weird one, but it serves a very specific purpose. You are allowed to keep trade secrets, but if you choose not to patent them and your competition does (because they figured out a more cost-effective way of doing it), then you just got what you deserved.

And the final nail in the coffin of overbroad patents would be to turn the patent office incentives around. Make the rejection of an application be financially the most beneficial result. Allow resubmissions, but make them exponentially more expensive, so companies can't just bombard the patent office with junk.

What you're talking about is a utility patent, for an embodiment (a product that embodies an invention)instead of allowing patents for inventions.

If you think it's sensible to require manufacture first, before a patent is granted then I don't think you've thought about this enough.

(fictionalisation) "right I tooled up my new design for a wafer fabrication plant, but someone else came up with the same idea and they got the patent last week, now I'm $20M in the hole and did so much needless duplication; now there's no money for us highly skilled people to make further improvements"

Yay! /s

Note that your last point applies to copyright as well.

And copyright shares a lot of the same problems. When everybody carries in their pocket a device that creates perfect copies of all kinds of information, the marginal economic value of a copy is reduced to zero, and you need to create artificial scarcity to support selling copies as a business model. That's why everyone is moving to "software as a service".

How do you reconcile your view with the fact that China is building up its domestic patent system? https://www.ipwatchdog.com/2018/10/04/weak-chinese-patent-ap...

https://www.raconteur.net/risk-management/how-china-became-l...

> “Over the past decade, China has demonstrated serious resolve to enforce an effective IP rights regime, and to bring the system in line with other developed systems in the US and Europe,” says Xingye Huang, associate at trademark and patent attorneys Abel & Imray. Indeed, China is on track to achieving its 2020 strategic goal laid out in 2008 of attaining a comparatively high level in terms of the creation, utilisation, protection and administration of IP rights.

Maybe China goes through what the young US went through?

200 years ago the US was a notorious thief of tech. The UK had strong export protections on skilled workers and important machinery, especially in the spinning industry.

Alexander Hamilton helped steal many trade secrets and helped many skilled US artisans migrate to the US, that was his government's policy, including paying for artisans' travels, suggesting to hand out bounties to people smuggling artisans out of the UK, and so on.

The US' strong copyright laws and international enforcement came later.

> How do you reconcile your view with the fact that China is building up its domestic patent system?

It's not out of the question that they're doing it as a pretext for protectionism. If their companies file a large number of garbage patents then their courts can throw them out if anyone tries to use them against a Chinese company but enforce them whenever they're used against a foreign company.

I've not been directly aware of the increased push for patents in China. I've audited number of small to large suppliers and have not felt that IP enforcement has any real meaning in China.

> Over the past decade, China has demonstrated serious resolve to enforce an effective IP rights regime, and to bring the system in line with other developed systems in the US and Europe

I think this is entirely questionable where you have rampant IP theft [1][2] (I can recall couple of major recent incidents), and the claim that 1 in 5 US companies face IP theft in China [3]. The Chinese government wants to attract foreign businesses and number 1 concern for any western company when they want to do business in China is IP. It doesn't surprise me that the Chinese government is drumming up its stance on IP protection.

Lack of respect for IP runs deep in Chinese culture, articulated in great detail by Paul Middler in his book "What's wrong with China?". Having worked in China for a long period, there is no better summary of the Chinese business culture.

[1] Huawei Case: https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-prosecutors-probe-huawei-on...

[2] Micron Case: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/22/technology/china-micron-c...

[3] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/28/1-in-5-companies-say-china-s...

> Lack of respect for IP runs deep in Chinese culture, articulated in great detail by Paul Middler in his book "What's wrong with China?". Having worked in China for a long period, there is no better summary of the Chinese business culture.

If you are reading Paul Middler's book about China, you probably don't know about China, because clearly Paul Middler doesn't know China[1].

[1]: https://www.scmp.com/culture/books/article/2125044/book-revi...

I was having dejavu one after another as I read through it and even more so when I read "Poorly made in China". It was by far the best (perhaps brutally honest) overview of the Chinese business culture, confirmed by other colleagues of mine who recommended this book to me.

Thanks for the link, I am gonna read about it and see what's being debated.

I know about a small western company acquired by a big Chinese multinational where Linux firmware devs are working on Windows boxes with no internet. Firewalled.

The company policy is to not allow internet on machines connected to the company network. They say that it is very typical on China for companies to try to atract workers from the competition, and these take with them not only know-how, but internal files from the company they leave too. Hence the firewalling.

It's ridiculous because I'm speaking of consumer electronics, not the military. The team morale is super low because they are fighting against the environment, not the problem they want to solve.

Maybe they only want to crash the western subsidiary and get the prestigious brand name(?). Anyways it seems that they are getting a taste of their own medicine.

Outside of those who are fearful of the PRC, mainly its own citizens and direct neighbors, will any nation take seriously any Chinese IP claim when they have spent nearly two decades of demonstrating complete disregard for anyone else's?

Yes, if they want to ever sell products in China.

What really matters in international relations is not how countries used to behave - it's how they behave now. Every country of note has at some point in the past been a pariah of one form or another.

If you believe patents harm innovation, then patents are a way of ossifying a country.

enforcing domestic patents is completely orthogonal to the enforcement of international patents.

Not just China though, pretty much all of SE Asia.

Thanks to the trade wars, manufacturing is spreading more quickly away from China to the surrounding countries where China still has a lot of influence, but US hasn't added tariffs (yet) ... labor is cheap and quality is just as high (or bad, depending on your view of things).

If you think the judicial system and 'no fucks' is non-existent in China, try Laos, Cambodia or Vietnam.

You're absolutely right. I've audited over 100 suppliers in SE Asia in manufacturing, the kind of things you see is completely, utterly insane. I've been to Pegatron (Apple supplier) to some shitty PCB supplier where the boards are running off the conveyor belt in a huge pile. No other book captures it as well as "What's wrong with China?" by Paul Middler [1]. Dejavu after dejavu as I read through it. It is amazing.

I think it is safe to extend argument not just for China, but the entire SE Asia. Hell, some regions in Vietnam smells almost like those PVD coating chemical gas chambers in Guangzhou.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Whats-Wrong-China-Paul-Midler/dp/1119...

I have lived in Vietnam for going on 4 years now and have travelled extensively through Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. Not just the tourist spots, but real back country places. I've seen it all first hand... the destruction that is going on in the region, by China's hand, is insane.

And in the past East Asian countries like South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan.

Back in the 70s, Japan had that reputation. Then South Korea and Taiwan had it in the 80s. Now that these countries produce valuable IP, they vigorously support and defend it.

There's an old quote from a legal scholar to the effect that it was a mistake to introduce patents, but now that we have them, it would be a greater mistake to get rid of them.

I honestly don't know. With regard to software, it's clear that patents are causing net harm to the industry - so maybe TiVo makes more money off licensing DVR patents than they did from DVRs, but that's about as close as software patents have ever come to working. But then you have cases like pharmaceuticals, where the high cost of R&D and the long lead time to getting a product to market makes patent protection absolutely essential to recoup costs. I suspect that most industries are closer to software than pharma, but suspicion isn't enough to go on.

I do know that the theoretical basis of the patent system, the exchange of public disclosure for temporary monopoly, doesn't work at all. A typical patent is written in a strange, pedantic style that obscures more about the underlying invention than it reveals. And a typical patented "invention" is usually a small aspect of a much larger product, parts of which can also be protected by trade secret and copyright as well, and those last well after the patent expires. So the rationale is utterly incoherent, but it's the law and we're stuck with it.

>Ideas are cheap, execution is where companies need to compete. //

A patent [the law intends] is granted for an invention, specifically not an idea. There needs to be a workable embodiment, sufficiently disclosed that a skilled reader can make the invention.

Making an idea a workable invention requires expending effort, that is why we need a patent system.

The alternative is industrial secrets, which IMO will greatly inhibit progress. Not because we can't reverse engineer but because of the costs of time and resources.

There is also an issue of sufficiency of patent disclosures reducing over time, patent offices need to be hot on that.

How do industrial secrets, which can safely be reverse-engineered, inhibit progress more than patents, which often intentionally omit important details and can be used to actively prevent reverse-engineering by competitors?

Patents encourage monopolisation by harming smaller companies more than large conglomerates. Small companies either take their chances and risk being sued out of existence or actively avoid patent infringement, wasting resources and limiting innovation.

If anything, patents discourage knowledge sharing because showing your work opens you up to liability for violating patents you may have been unaware of. The only form of "knowledge sharing" patents seem to encourage is filing patents, which only becomes "knowledge sharing" when they expire many years later.

EDIT: The most frequently cited counter-example is historical: guilds keeping trade secrets to prevent outsiders from just copying them. But this is meant to associate all the negative associations we have with that time and its level of technology with the absence of patents without doing the actual work of establishing anything resembling a causal relationship.

>patents, which often intentionally omit important details

These are invalid. That might not help against a troll of course.

>The only form of "knowledge sharing" patents seem to encourage is filing patents, which only becomes "knowledge sharing" when they expire many years later. //

I'd have to check for USA, but in Europe you can use a patent for research, that's the whole point really of having them. You can even make the invention for yourself, you can't sell it though without a license. When you make an improvement and the original inventor won't license then in UK they can be forced to license it.

Just playing devil’s advocate, companies will still want to protect their investment and competitive advantage. Without patents do we start seeing even more aggressive pushes towards implementations (ie cloud) that simplify maintaining trade secret? And longer more egregious non-competes?

Big Cos will stop publishing research. Typically today they file a patent before presenting research at conventions, etc.

Gadget manufactuers would also obfuscate or hide design features to make it harder for their inventions to be copied.

Also, I imagine, in the absence of patent protection, trade secret or non-compete laws would be more onerous.

That's already the case, you get pretty much no information from a patent nowadays, it's just legal-speak to be as broad as possible.

That's not really true... I learned a lot from reading Google's TPU patents, for example.

I was thinking of the same, if you go to any R&D center (or even a large manufacturing plant) in China, there is an unreasonable level of security. I've been held up for hours in front office security room because they won't let me go home with my briefcase since it was not registered during check-in, and I can't leave my briefcase with the security due to obvious reasons. Security guys had to escalate to corporate VP of security in HK to let me go.

This is an inevitable trade-off but it will not be like China mainly due to strong sense of distrust in Chinese society.

>Cloudfare can defend, but a mom-and-pop small business cannot. A startup cannot.

Agree. When it comes to patents, getting into court, and fighting back Most of the companies won't even get to a situation they need to spend money they don't have to fight this 'endless' war

Patent system was not meant for 21st century. Many drugs re-patented to profit higher, e.g., Albuterol.

Innovation should be protected with a capped value instead of a period of time.

> Ideas are cheap, execution is where companies need to compete

Have you thought about how this could mean the wealthy are almost always going to win?

Patents are helpful when you are small, and cannot win the scale war. Big companies + Rich People will always win in a world where they can copy ideas.

I mean, they already always win? Although it is kinda a tautology, since rich people and big companies are by definition the ones who won.

> Patents are helpful when you are small, and cannot win the scale war

That's a very naive view of things.

Big companies will be happy to license your stuff if they actually got something with it (an actual developed product or component) but they won't be much compelled to license if you just wave a patent in front of them.

"Oh but then you sue", yea, it's not that simple.

The rich can afford patents and can enforce them. Unless that changes it doesn't matter who has the idea first.

... You have to have an idea to patent. Just being rich, doesn't mean you can suddenly have rights to all the possible patents.

Copying means that you are always a step behind, and wealth doesn't replace the know-how necessary to recognize the good ideas. You can throw a lot of money on the fire by copying the wrong stuff.

Or you see a great idea, and spend to bulldoze the competition.

But I do agree patents have gone off the wrong end these days.