[bloppe]

Patents are a pragmatic contract between inventors and society:

- In order to be granted a patent, inventors must publish detailed descriptions of their inventions, including step-by-step instructions on how to re-create them. The inventions become public knowledge.

- In exchange for publishing the details of their inventions, society grants a temporary exclusive right to market the technology.

Without this system, the only way to safeguard a technological advantage would be to keep it secret. Inventors would be incentivized to maintain maximum secrecy for all new inventions. That would be bad for society, and inconvenient for inventors.

The patent system is an acknowledgement of this reality. Even though it seems a bit ridiculous, we allow people to claim temporary "ownership" of their new ideas, in order to incentivize the publishing of research, which eventually enters the public domain.

Clearly, there's some room for argument on the details of this specific case, but assuming the patent is legitimate, and that Apple infringed on it, then it would be bad for the long-term progress of science for us to let them get away with it.

[dylan604]

> Without this system, the only way to safeguard a technological advantage would be to keep it secret. Inventors would be incentivized to maintain maximum secrecy for all new inventions. That would be bad for society, and inconvenient for inventors.

And in today's world where reversing a product is pretty much a guarantee if the product is something anyone wants, the secret won't be kept for too long. (shhh, everyone's secret sauce is pretty much thousand island) Once the secret is out, anyone that wants to will copy it and now there's no protection.

[bloppe]

Ya, clearly patents are a good deal for inventors. I just think a lot of people fail to realize that it's also a good deal for society.

Without patents, who knows how many ideas would be stuck in the heads of individual people, reluctant not only to try to bring them to market, but to even discuss them with anybody. Why would anybody want to become an inventor, if there were so little upside?

[FpUser]

It is becoming harder and harder for an individual to file for and protect the patent due to costs involved.

[dylan604]

to be fair, it's harder and harder to come up with an idea first. there's a lot of patents that have to be researched to see if your idea is first or just a first^Nth person to have the idea. that's a definite specialty skill and even then they're not perfect

[delfinom]

The problem is many patents are incomplete, they don't actually contain step by step recreation instructions and it's especially problematic in the sciences fields.

The other issue is there are patents on ideas that aren't novel. There was some tightening of the rules such as the Alice software ruling but still lots of holes.

Case in point personally, our competitor patented the "idea" of putting a flexible PCB in a type of product. That's how bullshit it was and that was granted in 2020. Luckily we have prior art of a flexible PCB in a product of ours from 17years ago if they decide to ever start shit.