Musk: I can’t tell you much. We have essentially no patents in SpaceX. Our primary long-term competition is in China—if we published patents, it would be farcical, because the Chinese would just use them as a recipe book.
If your process/ideas are sufficiently complex, it reduces competition if you don't file a patent.
But for industries where that's not the case, like rockets (my current) or to pick another example from a previous job, magnetic bearings for sub-sea tubo-machinery installations like natural gas compressors[1], it makes no sense to file a patent. It's much easier to keep it a secret, because it's not like your competitors are going to scuba-dive down to the compressor control cabinet, whip out a JTAG and see how you've implemented your control loop on an FPGA.
Likewise, if you do patent it, it's very difficult to prove an infringement for the same reasons.
So essentially, in industries where it's not the case that your competitors can see what you've done, secrets over patents is the norm, in my experience, and has been for while.
[1] Mag bearings use electromagnetic stators and magnetic collars on the shaft to levitate the shaft inside a bit of spinning equipment. This means it's entirely non-contact, dramatically reducing wear, especially useful on difficult-to-service installations like sub-sea.
And in more accessible industries, where knowledge is abundant, costs low and independent reinvention highly probable, patents stall and block and create monopolies and in general cause economic damage in wasted time and money.
Man, we sure got a sweet deal out of this.
But there are a lot of issues with pharma patents, too, like evergreening old drugs by combining two existing about-to-expire into a new drug, or getting approved for a new on-label use, etc. (including really cynical stuff, like initially patenting a drug for use in one patient population (say, white people?) and then doing a new study and re-patenting for another specific population (asians, etc.), where there was never any reason to suspect the drug, disease, method of action, etc. would be different.
And the cost could be shared among the developed countries. And we could direct research towards causes and cures, instead of just treatments.
Drugs get made, researchers paid, companies compete on merit and enjoy a steady income instead on gambling on the next Viagra, we stop killing people in poor countries who can't afford monopolistic prices, and there is one less reason for having patents at all.
Medical device development is so interdisciplinary that I have zero confidence in the government being able to staff/grant/etc. its development. The only people in government likely to create medical devices would be end users who happen to be hackers, or government employees (at places like NIST) who are technical, need the product personally, and end up developing it on their own as a side project.
Government-funded R&D might work for NIH style long term research which is very structured and well understood, but I think it would be horrible for "hacking", which is what medical device creation largely is. What is really needed for devices is a bunch of bootcamp type programs for non-biomedical engineers to learn about the process, and clinicians posting to the Internet with their problems with current systems. I think today one of the main ways developers find out is when they or a family member/friend goes in for a procedure and they see a need.
"china can't compete because all their aerospace students are spies (joke from my chums in the physics department)"
My feeling is that you should use both. Patent the things you can't hide and keep secret the things you can.
If you think the competition is close to duplicating what you've kept secret, patent it then if possible.
Of course, if they, too, can keep it a secret, there's no point in patenting it. But if you know how to detect it, it might be worth patenting it.
EDIT: removed point about first-to-file as prior art would largely invalidate such attempts beyond a very narrow time frame.
The wiki article expounds a little: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leahy-Smith_America_Invents_Act...
If they went to court in the same country, you mean.
It's frustrating when you're working on a problem you're 90% sure a better funded industry player has already solved. Maybe they solved it through trial and error, without needing or wanting to understand the fundamental science behind it, but you then have to re-discover their results before you can even make progress in the understanding. But it's that understanding that's essential for developing completely new materials for the future. It's not all that bad, but it's certainly sub-optimal.
He's always told me that he'll never try to register its designs to any authority since the company's main competitors are the chinese, and that they do not care for forgein laws and registrations. Well, obviously.
Surely, this is not suitable to every businesses, but I couldn't think at the time that this would apply to the space industry as well.
The really hard part is the supply chain. For example, Apple was hit by the "bad cap" problem when they went with the cheaper caps (stolen formula): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague#Industrial_esp...
SpaceX appears to be producing so much of their design in-house that the suppliers don't yet play a major role. I'm going with the assumption SpaceX will be around long term, so that will be a challenge as they try to bring costs down even more. They're not selling to the high end market.
This is why Boeing and Lockheed had to play nice and form United Launch Alliance for the EELV & Space Shuttle Support Contract.
http://www.globalsecurity.org/space/systems/eelv-program.htm
They formed United Space Alliance (USA) for the Space Flight Operations Contract.