Patents exist specifically to avoid a fully free market. The trade-off is that in return for a time-limited legal monopoly on certain ideas and obvious derivatives, you have to publicly disclose what it is that you own. This also serves the practical purpose of allowing you to determine if you're potentially infringing anyone else because you can look at the patents. The free market approach would be no patents at all.

Patents exist to compel inventors to divulge their secrets, to allow future humanity to be able to replicate the processes when those with the secrets move on, by offering a time-limited monopoly in return as payment.

It is being suggested that if a secret is worth exposing, the people can simply make a direct offer for the things they want to know and let things they don’t care about, like how to buy an item online with one click, remain ‘secrets’. Patents wouldn't go away, but would by priced by their recognized value.

What would be no doubt lost are the things people don’t know that they want to know — ideas that aren’t commercially viable at the time of conception, for example. On the other hand, with the patent record now impossibly large, does anyone truly scour patents to seek out inventions they didn’t know they needed and derive a real benefit from them upon discovery?

This is how trade secrets work, not patents. The main point of a patent is to encourage inventors to divulge their secrets, by promising them temporary exclusive rights to control their tech in exchange for a public, detailed description of how it works. Eventually, the patent will expire and the technology will enter the public domain for the good of society. Without something like patents, technology would be much more secretive.

My point is that there is more than one way to make someone give up their secrets. Giving someone a monopoly seems wrong, because they will use it to block progress.

Governments already provide funding for scientific research. Why can't the same principle be used to "fund" the disclosure of technological secrets?

The point of the patent system is the exact opposite of what you claim.

To get a patent you must provide the full details of the invention, then your competitors can look at that patent and develop new systems that might be superior. This even applies to "software patents" (the different compression systems to beat LZ, or new versions of arithmetic coding - the most commonly derided "software patents" often seem to process/business patents rather than actual software).

This is the idea at least. In the absence of patent protection you get other problems: say you spent a year of your life coming up with a thing to do X, if you ship it some company can turn around and copy it without having to have invested any effort or money in the development, so can then also undercut you. "trade secrets" (an actual legal concept) doesn't protect you unless they steal the details from your company, but simply buying a product and reverse engineering (including decompiling) it is fine.

The problem is that the patent office allows patents that don't describe how to make the thing. That's where you get the BS style "X but on a computer", "X but with the internet", "X but with AI", ... or "compress data using some mechanism".

The patent office should just be requiring exact and explicit details in a patent application, so that you can read the patent and implement it. If you can't do that, the patent shouldn't be granted. (People periodically suggest "require an example implementation", but that for many fields there are huge costs involved in actually constructing a device so suddenly only people with a tonne of money can get patent protection)

That's effectively what the patent system already does. The "sum of money" you refer to is the market value of the monopoly on the idea embodied in the patent. This solves the problem of what the price should be.

It's not the same because a patent is a time-limited monopoly on a technology. This means that patents can be used to block the progress of other companies.

E.g. if A patents X and some large company B wants to use X and A refuses, then B cannot use X even if they offer millions.

You are also right. I was responding to this. (Italics mine)

> Like, if the government (or anybody, really) wants an invention to be open,

The government literally does want inventions to be open. It's in Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8 of the constitution. [0]

  [The Congress shall have Power . . . ] To promote the Progress of Science and 
  useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the 
  exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

[0] https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artI-S8-C8-1/...

> E.g. if A patents X and some large company B wants to use X and A refuses, then B cannot use X even if they offer millions.

How does this situation improve in any way if X is a trade secret? Under what circumstance would company A be willing to accept payment to make X open, but not willing to license X as a protected patent?

It sounds like you'd be in exactly the same situation except that there would be a massive collective action problem trying to figure out how much the world should pay A to make the invention open and who should pay it, and also A and B would have multi-million-dollar incentives to engage in corporate espionage and counter-espionage that achieves no progress.

Patents already explain how things work. The problem is limiting other people's ability to do something that someone claimed as their own with basically no effort.

Opinion: a truly free market is one where patents do not exist, in which case yes, the problem would be solved.

Free, and dead

No doubt the system is abused, but the solution isn't to eliminate all protections...Apple or Google have the money to instantly clone anything

Exactly, but also for most products so does any company that does any manufacturing.

There are very few companies that manufacture goods themselves due to the massive capital costs. But that means anyone can buy one the devices you invented, tear it down and reverse engineer it, and then send plans of to a (maybe the same!) manufacturing facility. They can even undercut you on price because they don't have to spend any money actually designing anything.

The "remove patents" argument fails for the same reason "remove copyright" fails. Developing anything takes time and money, and if there is no ability to profit from that (because anyone else can copy it - in the case of software this is literally - they can sell it cheaper than you), so there are legal protections for the "intellectual property" rather than just the physical goods being sold. If you remove them all sorts of things break: OSS/copyleft requires copyright - if you remove copyright then any company can take any "opensource" software and use it wholesale, and you can't require them to contribute anything back, or provide sources, or even make the binaries available.