In all fairness, as longs as patents exist you simply can't "open up" a piece of technology. What you can do is reverse engineer it, since it's allowed becausenof the manufacturer's drop of support
I don't really understand your comment. The whole point of a patent is that the description of the invention is made public. If you don't even want your competitors to know how you do it, then you keep the IP as a trade secret, but then you can't enforce a non-existent patent.
In all fairness, as longs as patents exist you simply can't "open up" a piece of technology
That's not true at all. Divulging data without offering license terms does nothing to hurt your ability to enforce intellectual property rights. The people using that data just do so knowing they're technically breaking the law. Patents are not trademarks.
Unlike trademarks, you can selectively enforce patents without risking them.
And in a way, the patent system is exactly about "opening up" technology. After all the idea of a patent is "you tell everyone how to build it, in return nobody is allowed to use that knowledge commercially for X years unless you allow it. This aligns great with "give us the tools to modify the software of hardware you find commercially unattractive".
I realize that is a bit of a topic change, but do you think that ideal reflects the reality of patents today?
I've read a lot of modern patents, and not one of them was written to convey useful information. They're all dense legal writing, and as vague as the author can get away with.
Most medium/big companies have patent attorneys whose entire job is writing patents. They don't care about the patents having any useful details to make it a useful reference. Usually the attorneys aren't subject experts on the patent topic, and couldn't make it accurate even if they tried.
Modern patents are a game where you file a whole bunch and then wait for somebody to step on one by accident with a parallel invention. Then you sue them unless they have enough patents to also sue you.
Patents don't promote innovation at all, at least not any more. If anything, they're a tax on our industry and they stifle small players - exactly the sort of person who they're supposed to help.
I think that is something to write our congressman about (or equivalent if not in US). Right now not only are patents written for lawyers, but the law encourages you not to look at patents since if you don't know about something relevant and you reinvent it you owe less damages than if you knew and still chose to infringe.
For patents to be useful they need to be writing in the language of experts in the field -not lawyers. And the law needs to make it best for my employer to make me search for and read potentially relevant patents before doing anything. That is infringing after making an effort to avoid a patent (that the courts decide is not enough effort) is better than infringing without knowing.
