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Comment by jwestbury | Hacker News Reader

The purpose of patents is to encourage disclosure. By disclosing how something is accomplished, a business is rewarded with exclusive use of their method for a limited period.

I think the argument to be made in many fields is that patent law does not necessarily function correctly when technology advances so quickly.

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What is the value in that disclosure? No software developer has ever looked at a patent for inspiration or to learn how something works.

Easier/faster replication/implementation/new invention etc is the value. There are other people besides software developers that can look at a patent for inspiration and hire software developers to implement it

Maybe this happens somewhere in some industry I'm not aware of? There are many different kinds of documents I use to help me write code, but looking at even just a few (software) patents, they never seemed like they were written in a way that was useful to me?

The patents are deliberately obfuscated these days, which makes this fairly difficult to actually do.

The usefulness of the patent disclosure is that it allows someone to write a different document, paper, or blog post that explains how it works in terms a normal software engineer can understand. Without that patent, none of the other public documentation of how to do something would exist.

You don't read the patent to learn how something works, you learn by reading other explanations that can be made available because the patent exists.

No, you learn through reverse engineering the software. It's easier than reading a patent, and patents don't reflect reality anyway. No one reads patents.

Maybe it's because I started as a chemist, where you look at patents all the time, but yes I've absolutely looked at patents for inspiration, to figure out how things work, to attack certain problems, etc.

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