> “If you disclose your invention publicly and do not file an application within one year, you could be barred from receiving a patent on that exact invention,” she says. “Because of the ‘first to file’ system, if someone steals your idea by filing first, this can be hard and very expensive to reverse.”
If that doesn't tell you it's an extortion racket on anyone with useful ideas then I don't know what will.
The US is actually permissive relative to other countries. In most countries if you disclose your invention before filing you lose the right to patent it.
Everybody loses right to patent it. Which is fair.
In US someone else can still patent your invention if you didn't. That's where the extortion is to patent it.
ANS encoding was invented and published by it's inventory without patent explicitly for everybody to be able to use it.
And yet Microsoft just patented a subset of it. It was granted a patent on a thing they didn't invent and was already published for the explicit goal of leaving it patent free.
In theory that patent is not valid since it is based on something that was already published, but I agree that in practice some companies will pay to avoid going to court.
If that doesn't tell you it's an extortion racket on anyone with useful ideas then I don't know what will.