[tomp]

Despite the title this blog post seems to be more about the unfortunate trade that "the commons" did with private inventors: originally patents were meant as an alternative to trade secrets - you revealed the trade secret to the public, and in exchange you got 20 years of exclusive use of said (no-longer-)secret.

But now we've got the worts of both worlds: companies patent an essential part of their process to gain exclusivity and prevent others from reinventing the process, and also keep trade secrets for most of the rest of the process, so that the patent itself is 99% useless - you'll still need to reinvent the process, except you're only allowed to do that 20 years later.

[zokier]

But the deal hasn't really changed, companies get protection for the things they reveal in the patent. The thing that has changed is that companies have recognized that they do not need protection/exclusivity, so they do not apply for it. This is presumably in part because they judge successful reverse-engineering to be sufficiently difficult to function as deterrence.

[disgruntledphd2]

The article states that they are actually allowed to keep all of this secret, since the 1980s.

This was not the case before then. I often wondered how the patent system lost it's usefulness, and the article does a pretty good job of explaining this. Sure it has a bias, but I read a lot of financial news, so it's definitely a useful counterpoint.