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Comment by MichaelApproved | Hacker News Reader

> it encourages people to invent new ideas and disclose their inventions

Is that really the point? I thought it was to allow you to time to profit off of the R&D investment made to develop the idea before it was freely available to the market.

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Nope. That purpose is satisfied by trade secrets. The point of a patent is specifically to incentivize disclosure- to give you a means of retaining the same economic advantage you would have if you kept it secret, so that you can recoup your investment, without having to actually keep it secret.

The advantage for the patent holder of a patent over a trade secret is that, if someone finds out your secret, you're hosed; but if someone copies your patent without licensing before it expires, then you can sue them. So, you agree to disclose and then release your invention after a fixed time period in exchange for greater economic security during that period.

Outside of web services and food, does anyone rely on trade secrets?

yes

Lots of companies. To sue for patent infringement you first have to find out that they are infringing your patent. That's very difficult in many cases (e.g. production methods). In comparison keeping a trade secret may be much more viable.

For many small companies it's often too costly to enforce their patents worldwide, while keeping secrets is easier the smaller the company is.

And in many non-software inventions, even if you build the product and market it, the secret is not obvious: that is to say, the means of producing that product.

For instance, you might come up with, oh, a high yield method for producing some valuable chemical and keep it secret while just selling the chemical. The ability to obtain the patent encourages the disclosure of the recipe for that high yield method, while ensuring that you get compensated by licensing. This protection lasts for some time, and then the knowledge becomes patent free. In the alternative scenario, the secret process might just die with the company. Or, someone else figures it out not long after, does better marketing, and eats the original inventor's lunch. So there is a wager involved. The certainty of so many years of protection, versus the uncertainty of someone figuring out the secret.

right, if by "many" you mean "a small minority"

Well, patents are a deal between inventors and government. In exchange for protection for a set period of time, the inventor reveals the workings of the idea. That protection does give the inventor time to profit. Without that, the inventor would have no incentive to disclose.

Trade secrets are different, hard to demonstrate, and critical to protect. For example, Apple is trying really hard right now to protect its trade secret iOS from being revealed by the FBI.

More on trade secrets: http://www.wipo.int/sme/en/ip_business/trade_secrets/protect...

Trade secrets are impossible in the case of most patents. The majority of patents are easy to understand by just looking at the product. The supposed revelations of patent filing amount to nothing at all, especially given that almost all patents are effectively obfuscated anyway.

I would argue that most of those are bad patents, which should not have been issued. One of the criteria for being awarded a patent is that your invention be non-obvious to an expert in the relevant field. If just looking at the product is sufficient to disclose everything you need to reproduce it, that doesn't necessarily mean that the idea is "obvious", but it should give one pause, and warrant further investigation into whether or not this particular invention is really worth patenting.

No, my comment applies equally to "good" patents. When someone invents something truly non-obvious, it is still usually easy to figure out by looking at the results, so the "revelations" in the patent application are of no value. As a society, we have no interest in giving people a monopoly over truly non-obvious inventions unless failing to do so would make the invention not happen (which is a different argument than the revelation one).

Trade secrets don't protect against reverse engineering or simply copying behavior. Historically, one of the rationalizations of patents was to encourage disclosure, but the exact wording, at least in the US constitution, gives no specific reasons.

Well, this is simply wrong as:

"The Congress shall have power ... To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;"

That is the exact sentence to which I refer. Note that it says nothing about "disclosure" or "recouping investments in R&D" or "protecting the little guy" or any of the rationalizations people typically assign to the patent system. It is deliberately vague and open to interpretation, specifying in broad terms only the means ("time limited monopolies") and the ends ("progress of ... the useful arts").

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