But the reason they haven’t been acted upon (that I know of) is that economic difficulty of making a competing Teflon has to do chiefly with issues of manufacturing scale and large up front capital expenditure. This is true across the entire chemicals industry for any new product. Rule of thumb costs were, the last I heard, roughly 100 Million in development to get a single product into baseline commercial viability.
Why compete against an established and “tainted” product like Teflon? Can you guarantee the PFAS free process is cheaper at any of the initial commercial scales you’re likely to achieve? Is there a market for an off-brand substitute?
These kinds of risks delimit innovation in physical manufacturing far more than the possession of IP.