You're mincing words. Think of the idea as being the formulation and you'll find agreement between the statement and your example.

Do you mean that if I had invented a "machine for airborne transportation", such as, say, a hot-air balloon, I could collect royalties on jet airplanes?

If your claims were sufficiently written and not obvious in light of the prior art, yes. In this case, your claims would have to contend with literally millennia of prior art up to the story of Icarus, and including the drawings of Leonardo Da Vinci.

This kind of super-broad patent enforcement happened with 3D printing, and is still happening with e-ink technology. In both cases, the patents didn't have centuries of prior art covering what would otherwise have been entire industries, and could protect their monopolies for 20 years.

> You're mincing words

"mincing words" is a good description of law in general. That's no criticism at all.

Patents are supposed to cover non-obvious invented ideas - "drug that alleviates [condition]" doesn't sound like it can be invented, since drugs are commonly used to treat conditions, so there's no new invention here. The ideas you can patent are the use of a molecule for a purpose and the method of producing it. That's already pretty broad.

> "drug that alleviates [condition]" doesn't sound like it can be invented, since drugs are commonly used to treat conditions, so there's no new invention here

It's been attempted. They invent and patent X as a "method to do Y", and then try to sue others who do Y via some means other than X.

My point was that the original description of patents was not precise enough and implied that you could patent Y rather than X.

I have never heard of people using method patents to sue over methods other than things similar to methods in the claims. Usually, the claims are as general as you can get away with, and cover a lot more than just the actual "X" that they are introducing to the market. When someone does something similar to "X" without reading the patent, they can easily be walking in one of the claim sets that has been patented in the "method to do Y" patent. Most people who want to copy something do it in a fairly unoriginal way.

Still, patent claims are never as broad as "drug to alleviate headaches" or anything similar.

But you can patent your formulation in a way that will encompass many other formulations that might be distinct from your preferred implementing formulation... this is a basic tenet of patent law.