Elon Musk believes this as well. In a 2012 interview by Chris Anderson published in Wired[1] on why SpaceX does not patent anything:
Anderson: So what have all your creative people come up with, then? What’s different in your basic technology versus 50 years ago?
Musk: I can’t tell you much. We have essentially no patents in SpaceX. Our primary long-term competition is in China—if we published patents, it would be farcical, because the Chinese would just use them as a recipe book.