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by Angostura 109 days ago
The only disadvantage I see might be the increase in use of trade secrets if patents no longer look sufficiently attractive. The quid pro quo basically used to be 'tell us your secret sauce and in return you'll get monopoly use for a period. There's a bit of a balancing act. Of course that original concept has been corrupted
2 comments
observationist 109 days ago
Yeah, but the advantage in the modern world is reverse engineering things is easy; if your tech isn't patented, it can be copied, and if existing patents don't cover it, they can file a patent on the copy, and then you're paying royalties to the ones that copied your tech, etc. We're almost at the point that you can take a video, give it to an AI, and have it produce CAD drawings, circuit schematics, and detailed process documents to rebuild something. We're going to need responsive, flexible, and clear laws around things. The current system is also designed around a court system and process that regularly drags out for 3+ years, and results in lawyers being paid obscene amounts of money. Having a clear claim and no legal technicalities means authors don't have to invest years of their lives and lots of money to fight big companies who don't care about losing a few hundred grand just on principle, and so forth.

A whole lot of the pacing and timing around copyright laws originate with conventions from pre-electricity times, and only get perpetuated because grifty people want their legalized scams to continue.

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kube-system 109 days ago
> Yeah, but the advantage in the modern world is reverse engineering things is easy; if your tech isn't patented, it can be copied

That's true for products that are freely distributed, less so for inventions that are more closely held.

If you're doing something like cutting-edge physics, aerospace, semiconductors, biotech, etc -- trade secrets have always been pretty compelling by default, and patents were seen as a way to encourage more sharing.

It's a balance, and I think we should be mindful that we don't get too caught up in worrying about mass-produced widgets of little importance "taking advantage" of patents so much that we eliminate out the incentive to share the real cutting edge advancements.

In an alternative software world, "Attention is all you need" could have been a trade secret instead of a public paper.

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rcxdude 108 days ago
How easy reverse engineering something is varies a lot. Something where the production process is the secret can be almost impossible to reverse engineer, for example.
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ndriscoll 108 days ago
Stop legally protecting trade secrets then. Why would we have a system that simultaneously grants a limited benefit for sharing information while granting unlimited protection for not sharing? This obviously creates an incentive to only patent things you expect others will soon figure out anyway, which means the patent only harms society.

Make the incentive "if I don't share my information in exchange for a patent, any of my engineers could leave for a competitor and share all of my information tomorrow anyway." You take the offer society gives, or you get nothing.

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