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Trade Trade Secrets

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28 pointsDaniFong7 comments

Thanks for thoughtful exploration. Here are some of my open questions.

Should patents be abolished and copyright extended to cover non-transcribed acts of copying (e.g. pharma, creating the same program with different source)? Is copyright or short term patents (7 years? 15 years?) a viable alternative?

What are some downsides of not having patents in their current form? In a shorter term form?

How do we move beyond patents as a society and business community?

I think that copyright, with a shorter term, is a very reasonable model for pharmaceuticals given the current FDA process, but it is not complete. The FDA still frowns upon off label use -- but the challenges in medical regulation are for another, longer discussion.

I do think that patents allow for a brief period, post product release, of allowing one to recoup the costs of initial investment. But if I were to rearrange the terms, I would suggest that the patent expire 3 years post-initial commercial release, or 15 years after filing -- whichever is shorter.

Generally, I think that we should force more creativity out of our thieves. I think the patent system should revert to something much closer to copyright.

In the meantime, groups of companies could support defensive patent pools, or the patent pledge.

Would be interesting to be more specific - LightSail actually sounds like the kind of situation people are more likely support patents in: non-obvious research work leading to large improvements over existing methods; presumably it woudld be considerably easier to reverse engineer if you had to the physical device. And I imagine company could productively use huge investment to have huge impact but investment might be hard without reassurance of IP.

So you say you have secrets - are there patents on the mechanism itself? Did investors request/care about those patents?

Maybe is different in this case cos I wouldn't be surprised if author actually was happy for this technology to be successful even if some other company made more money out of it.

Also for anyone who hasn't, read around rest of the website also!

We have several patents issued. Unfortunately, as I explain how law shapes the business landscape" one cannot simply choose not to patent their work; others can patent it, or patent "around" it. So we have been forced to play this game -- and we win the games we are forced to play.

There are several fields though, where the innovations necessary to make a great product are scattered around many different companies. Unfortunately the apparatus today makes it difficult to really get the initial consensus to collect the licenses to test the market.

Interesting, I've not heard much about multiple patent licensing deadlock before but sounds like it could be common.

Watch out for Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, the motivated, sometimes creative, sometimes brilliant thief that can take your idea further than you ever dreamed.

There's a huge potential value in some types of 'theft' (maybe not according to Xerox). The notion that in fact a thief might not be lazy, and in fact might do radically more with a premise than the originator ever could or would or dared to try to.

I do argue that this is neither theft nor transcription, but transformation or inspiration.

Xerox did, by the way, try to commercialize their technology. They just misfired massively. The Xerox Star bombed, because execution matters -- a main point.

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