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Comment by bawolff | Hacker News Reader

The point of the patent was less about ensuring people invent, and more about ensuring people invent in the open so other people can (eventually) build on it. The thought goes, that without patents, people will be super secretive about their inventions and the general public will never find out how they work, and thus nobody would ever be able to improve on other people's inventions.

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We tried the carrot and it clearly resulted in a dysfunctional system. Time to bring out the stick instead.

And now ironically, companies that keep their inventions secret use the patent system to hinder open development of protocols, file formats, and software.

I'm skeptical. The Constitution says "to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts".

I’m skeptical too but what OP describes would “promote progress” (by promoting openness vs secrecy). I agree that I’ve always had it explained as “promote progress [by incentivizing creation] but it doesn’t technically specify what he’s implying or what we are.

Because as we all know there is only one constitution in the whole world, and what it says holds true about everything everywhere for all time...

From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia:

> A patent is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the legal right to exclude others from making, using, or selling an invention for a limited period of time in exchange for publishing an enabling disclosure of the invention.

Patents have always been about "promoting the progress of science and useful arts" by promoting disclosure of inventions. The two are intricately linked. More disclosure = more progress.

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