Hacker News Reader

Comment by gohbgl | Hacker News Reader

Patents are primarily about getting a limited time monopoly. Publicly disclosing the invention is just a direct consequence and not a virtue of the patent system. So please stop marketing it like that. In many cases it is completely irrelevant because the invention is sold and can be reverse engineered.

Also: > Encouraging people to share information so that others can use it to make further advances is the whole point of the patent system.

This is meant as a joke, right? Is locking down a field of engineering for 20 years promoting further progress? Maybe it promotes the invention of sub-optimal solutions to work around the patent but that's about it. The latest example I can think of is all-in-one liquid cooling designs: https://www.gamersnexus.net/hwreviews/3517-swiftech-h360x3-d...

View on HN

> Patents are primarily about getting a limited time monopoly.

Nope. Patents have always been about encouraging public disclosure of secrets. This has been the case since they were invented by the Venetians in order to break trade guilds and their literal on-pain-of-death secret maintenance.

The idea was to offer the secret-holder a deal: if you reveal your secret, you get a significant but temporary government-enforced monopoly on use of that secret. If you don't reveal your secret, then you'll just have to hope it doesn't get leaked.

The monopoly is the tool of patent law. But the purpose of patent law is disclosure of information.

Patents have always been about encouraging public disclosure of secrets. ... The monopoly is the tool of patent law. But the purpose of patent law is disclosure of information.

I like that formulation. But in that case we shouldn't be granting patents on things that can be immediately (or even within 5 years) reverse engineered from working examples.

I genuinely like that idea. We should change the patent approval process work like an episode of penn&teller's "Fool Us", where the patent office has to guess what your patent is, before reviewing it. If the patent office is right, rejection; wrong, approval. We could televise it and subsidise the whole thing with advertising revenue. This is not a joke.

Are you suggesting you have to make an example, so if I design a new rocket engine I have to have 10s of millions of $$$ to spend on making one before you'll give me a patent, and then you might decide it was obvious? And I have to disclose it in public prior to getting protection?

Are you sure that's not a joke.

I would say incent rather than encourage but otherwise I agree completely.

Well over 100,000 utility patents get granted every year in the US alone [1]. Care to show me all the secrets we would been unable to reverse engineer or independently invent without the patent system?

[1] https://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/ac/ido/oeip/taf/us_stat.ht...

The whole original idea behind the patent system is that you would be granted a time-limited monopoly in exchange for making your idea “patent” (frequently pronounced “pay-tent”, and meaning “obvious”), rather than trying to maintain it as a trade secret (in the formal, legal sense).

You can argue that the monopoly term is too long, or that patents are being granted on things that are already obvious, or that you don’t like the whole idea of it; but the fact is that the monopoly vs. disclosure trade-off, and its public utility, was and is the intention behind the patent system.

Nit-pick: Patent means 'open'. The first protected inventions were a sub-class of things monarchs wrote about in litterae patentes (open letters).

Adding to pbhjpbhj's reply: The name "patent" goes back to letters patent which, among other things, was the practice of monarchs granting monopolies to favored cronies. This resulted in the Statue of Monopolies in England 1624 that restricted the monarch to grant monopolies to inventors only. Going forward this would form the basis for the modern patent system in the United States. Saying that the patent system is primarily about disclosing inventions is a bait because it most often does not matter. How important is it that William C. Hooker who invented the spring mouse trap (patent US528671A) had to publish the invention? If you want to sell your invention you almost always automatically reveal the secret.

> Publicly disclosing the invention is just a direct consequence and not a virtue of the patent system.

Umm, no.

That was the whole idea behind the system -- to make your information public in exchange for a limited time monopoly on your invention.

Before this people just kept things secret and tried to enforce a monopoly through things like guild memberships and whatnot.

Before patents, businesses depended fully on trade secret, meaning developments would be made and lost over and over, and progress on a particular technology would be a lot slower because nobody could ever build off of eachother's work.

The patent system today is not really what it was meant to be, but the original patent system I think was an improvement over the status quo of the day.

That is not true. In fact the case if the steam engine highlights how harmful patents are. When the patent expired the amount of innovation flourished.

Patent law, like many other economic interventions relies on claims and arguments that have little to no evidence.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com