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Comment by new299 | Hacker News Reader

Maybe someone here knows the answer to this:

How much of this stolen stuff would already be disclosed (or soon to be disclosed) in patents?

Do they really just try and protect these inventions largely as trade secrets?

If it's largely covered by patents, then obviously there is some value in knowing what has been tried/has actually worked. But doesn't patent coverage give them Google/Waymo a stronger way to protect these inventions?

(please note I'm not arguing for/against software/algorithm patents, just trying to better understand)

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Broad strokes (and very simplistic) philosophy...

Patents are most useful for inventions that can be easily reverse engineered. If the competition can disassemble a unit and create their own derivative from the knowledge gained, a patent blocks the use of a derivative while not revealing anything that would not be revealed by reverse engineering anyway.

If an invention is very difficult to reverse engineer, it is better to keep it a trade secret because the competition (ideally) will not be able to create a derivative via reverse engineering. In this case, a patent will reveal information that a competitor would otherwise not be able to discover e.g. by reverse engineering.

Isn't the worry then that someone else comes up with the invention independently and patents it? (and does the US being a first-to-file patent system have an impact on this)

The patent would probably be invalid if the product was already on the market from a different vendor.

Hasn't (or isn't) the USPTO switching to a first-to-file system? Proving prior art using a trade-secret is likely to be a very challenging proposition (due to the 'secret' bit). IANAL.

Right, but if the product is on the market, doesn't that make the whole trade secret thing kind of void anyway? Because it most likely can be reverse engineered?

If it's provided to users only as a service, then I can see they could protect it as a trade secret by limiting access somehow. But then... would that invalidate the patent (considering the first-to-file stuff).

Patents start from the filing date and last twenty years. Some of these things Google has could be several years old already, and it's unlikely that self driving cars will be on the road for at least another few years. Patenting something in 2010 that won't be profitable until 2020 means you've killed half the lifetime of the patent, so in that case a trade secret may be much better.

The classic example of where a trade secret works well is for the recipe (original) for coca-cola.

Well that and the fact that nobody else is allowed to import one of the known ingredients, coca leaves: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coca-Cola#Use_of_stimulants_in...

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