> Patents are primarily about getting a limited time monopoly.
Nope. Patents have always been about encouraging public disclosure of secrets. This has been the case since they were invented by the Venetians in order to break trade guilds and their literal on-pain-of-death secret maintenance.
The idea was to offer the secret-holder a deal: if you reveal your secret, you get a significant but temporary government-enforced monopoly on use of that secret. If you don't reveal your secret, then you'll just have to hope it doesn't get leaked.
The monopoly is the tool of patent law. But the purpose of patent law is disclosure of information.
Patents have always been about encouraging public disclosure of secrets. ... The monopoly is the tool of patent law. But the purpose of patent law is disclosure of information.
I like that formulation. But in that case we shouldn't be granting patents on things that can be immediately (or even within 5 years) reverse engineered from working examples.
I genuinely like that idea. We should change the patent approval process work like an episode of penn&teller's "Fool Us", where the patent office has to guess what your patent is, before reviewing it. If the patent office is right, rejection; wrong, approval. We could televise it and subsidise the whole thing with advertising revenue. This is not a joke.
Are you suggesting you have to make an example, so if I design a new rocket engine I have to have 10s of millions of $$$ to spend on making one before you'll give me a patent, and then you might decide it was obvious? And I have to disclose it in public prior to getting protection?
Well over 100,000 utility patents get granted every year in the US alone [1]. Care to show me all the secrets we would been unable to reverse engineer or independently invent without the patent system?
Nope. Patents have always been about encouraging public disclosure of secrets. This has been the case since they were invented by the Venetians in order to break trade guilds and their literal on-pain-of-death secret maintenance.
The idea was to offer the secret-holder a deal: if you reveal your secret, you get a significant but temporary government-enforced monopoly on use of that secret. If you don't reveal your secret, then you'll just have to hope it doesn't get leaked.
The monopoly is the tool of patent law. But the purpose of patent law is disclosure of information.