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by timdierks 4270 days ago
Patents need have little to nothing to do with products, and any article which claims that a patent disclosure reveals something unannounced about a product can be ignored without reading.
1 comments

Yay, downvote!

What for? I continue to assert that articles that claim that patents reveal things about products are unfounded.

I have a number of patents myself: companies file them all the time with little to no concern for whether they'll use them in a product. Thus, the existence of a patent is little to no evidence regarding products.

What you said about the relationship between products and patents is true and worth adding to the discussion, fwiw.

I think making it an absolute - ie, there is never anything to learn along these lines - is going too far, but there are certainly a lot of patents that never see further development.

It's a little bit of hyperbole, sure, but I don't recall ever seeing a press article that used a patent disclosure to offer any real insight about unreleased products. I'd be happy to see a counterexample.