The Chinese cloning threat is largely overrated unless your product is very simple and you have 0 branding.

A perfect counter-example to patents is FDM printers, which were incredibly expensive and inaccessible to the average hobbyist until the Stratasys patents started to expire. Now while it’s true there’s a lot of Chinese printers on the market, that hasn’t killed western companies - Pruša might be 2x-3x pricier than a Creality, but the 3D printing farms I know still went with the former, due to higher reliability and the fact that they need less fiddling to produce high quality outputs.

Meanwhile Stratasys is still selling $100k machines, and I highly doubt any of their customers would rather buy a cheap Chinese 3D printer instead.

The cloning threat is very real on high end systems. Things like electric train propulsion, water purification systems, tons of various industrial designs with enormous upfront R&D were copied wholesale.

Branding is completely irrelevant to the issue, you could well come up with say explosion-safe proportional valve design that is sold OEM worldwide and that an average consumer might not even know exists as a category.

> The Chinese cloning threat is largely overrated unless your product is very simple and you have 0 branding

This is proven false by the amount of top-selling products that Amazon has ripped off, produced for less (sometimes by striking a deal with the original factory), and then labeled “Amazon Basics”

Any examples of that where the product isn't commodity-grade? The AmazonBasics examples I see are things like household appliances, cables, cheap accessories, lightbulbs and batteries. If you're a small-to-medium sized business in the West, you should try to target market segments where the quality, branding and support of the product matters, as obviously you will lose in a race-to-the-bottom of undifferentiated low-quality commodities.

Look at how Raspberry Pi still manages to maintain a huge market presence despite the prevalence of cheap Chinese clones - even if the latter occasionally have superior specs on-paper, in practice I have yet to find one that isn't vastly inferior in terms of ecosystem and software.

It sucked in different ways, but its not clear that it sucked more.

The point of the patent system is that you share your invention in the world, in exchange for monopolizing it for a few years. The problem is that most software patents share absolutely nothing of value with the world.

I'm with you on software patents, but they are only a fraction of patents landscape and really pertinent only to North America. But naturally it's overemphasized here on HN.

Way overemphasized here on HN. The USPTO is in a terrible spot right now. Your IP is not worth what it was before the AIA (America Invents Act). It essentially decimated the patent system. I won't go into specifics.

I think another misconception is the entire purpose of the USPTO. The USPTO wants EVERYTHING in the entire universe to be in the public domain. To achieve this, you give them your idea and in exchange they give you a monopoly for 20 years minus prosecution time. Even worse, anything you publish anywhere on earth after one year automatically gets in the public domain.

Anyways, enough ranting, but the system is very expensive and is actually not incentivizing the "inventor" anymore.

Can we do away with this myth that patenting something will somehow put knowledge into the open. Has anyone here actually read a patent? They absolutely will not tell you how to do something. In particular I know for fact that, the things that are actually valuable are either never patented or specifically omitted from the patents so that no one can actually reproduce a method technology from a patent because some crucial steps are missing.

> Can we do away with this myth that patenting something will somehow put knowledge into the open.

They said it's the purpose of the patent system, not the real-world effect. It's very important to remind people of this purpose. Because people (especially lawyers) keep pushing this concept that ownership on a patented idea is some kind of natural right being protected by law. Which is completely opposite to reality, and part of what leads to the system being warped in the way you complain about.

That's not the rule, patents have to be reproducible by a man of the trade. Not disclosing crucial steps in the claims, even if overlooked by an examiner, is also a handicap: someone can circumvent your patent if the actual substance is missing.

Have a look at the original Gore membrane patent: https://patents.google.com/patent/US4194041A/en

It's very clear, detailed and reproducible.

And since we are on HN, here a bit on the software side: IBM original arithmetic coding patent.

https://patents.google.com/patent/US4905297A/en

Perhaps it something that should not have been patented, but it's fully disclosed and reproducible.

I'd be very interested in a writeup. My gut feeling was always that it is in fact not incentivizing the "inventor" either. I do see people at big institution filing patent after patent, but it seems very inaccessible for a normal human being like me.

Exactly. Patents protect only monopoly of large companies. Getting a patent in EU or in USA is very expensive ranging from tens of thousands and up to hundreds of thousands. Big part of this money goes to totally unproductive parasitic hands.

The fees are half for small businesses, and 1/4 for "micro entities". If you only want a US patent it isn't very expensive. Investors want to see patents which implies they have value, even if it's an uphill battle to take on a big company.

Though I do agree lawyers and govts have basically colluded to create a system to suck money out of business in return for being allowed to function.

> In practice you'll have a head start of maybe a year before a grifter in China replicates your three years of R&D and floods the market.

So, not much different then?

It's different in that you can prevent the imports of copies into the mature markets by suing the importers.