[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.