Filings do not equal patents. China floods the market with scientific papers and only a very tiny percentile actually have anything useful. China is obsessed with publishing. I’ve often wondered if it’s for prestige or survival.
Even if the patents are accepted, you will still have to defend it in court because other patents could have been filed earlier which have significant overlap of your patented idea which could invalidate everything. I have personally seen engineers getting patents granted for technology which is obviously already in use elsewhere and is already patented. USPTO is a joke especially for software based inventions. I just want to know, how can anyone even claim to know they aren't infringing on some part of one of the nearly 300,000 patents granted yearly?
> Interesting so patents do not offer legal protection.
There are generally two legal fields related to patents - patent prosecution (getting the patent) and patent litigation (fighting in court). There is not very much overlap between the lawyers; each is very specialized.
People get patents for a lot of different reasons, only one of which is to hold up in court. If that’s what you want, you have to hire lawyers that will make that happen. It costs more money and takes more time, but if you want a patent that holds up in court you have to hire the right people to write it correctly, from the very beginning of the process.
Again, this is not what everyone wants. Most patents are intended to be for defensive, negotiation, or vanity purposes - the expense involved with making it bulletproof is just not worth it.
The USPTO checks for prior art. The result is not set in stone but if they don't find prior art then they grant the patent. The patent can then still be challenged in court by other companies.
Your edge is agility and bringing your following with you to a superior product. If you have no following then maybe it is time to acquire one. Personal brand is the future, like it or not
> Good luck to raise non IT capital in tech without patents
Again, this wouldn't be a problem if there were no patents
No. Lets take the most extreme example. Medicine. Development and clinical trials cost you more than a billion. Why would I risk this? I let you develop it, I let you do the clinical trials and then just copy it. Even better. I can always sell cheaper than you since I don't have to recover investment costs.
The patents are the only incentives for the investors to accept the risk.
My wife has worked for a series of VC funded immunotherapy startups. No government money funding them. If there were no biotech patents it’s hard for me to see why anyone would invest hundreds of millions into these tiny companies. The money doesn’t go to salaries - it goes to equipment, supplies, and trials.
Central planners spending other people’s money cannot possibly compete with the private system.
Most of the primary research is NIH money handed out to university researchers. But then easily as much money is spent in human trials and that’s privately funded.
It is people risking money in order to earn huge profits that makes the system work. The government spends enormous amounts of money on basic research, much of it ineffectively IMO. Bringing cutting edge therapies to the market was, is, and always will be through the entrepreneurial system. Believing bureaucrats can accomplish the same thing is naïveté.
Perhaps we should finally just start blatantly cloning their patents and products like they/ve done us, see how far that goes. It's obviously gotten them far.
The Case Against Patents http://research.stlouisfed.org/wp/2012/2012-035.pdf/