The more I look into it, the more I'm convinced that current state of IP law is the rot at the core of western worlds technological stagnation. The rise of monopolistic megacorps, lack of independent innovation and enshittifcation can pretty much be traced back to the wide free market violating reach of current IP law.
This article just highlights it and shows how China weaponized this weakness of the west and is successfuly using it to pull ahead.
Meanwhile our own innovative companies and individuals get ground into dust by the boot of patent lawyers wielded by megacorps.
It's telling that before the Patent system the solution was secretive guilds that jealously (sometimes lethally) guarded their secrets to avoid competition. This was obviously terrible since it greatly slowed down innovation.
I'm not sure what the correct solution is to this problem. We want to avoid anything that causes a return of the guild system, but at the same time we don't want small inventors steamrolled by large corporations.
That said, I think corporations should be much more limited in their Patent powers. In fact it's questionable how much value society gets out of large corporation patents. If another large corporation "steals" the idea and capitalizes on it first that is their own fault. The only people who profit are the lawyers.
(Repeating for umpteenth time:) I wish patent fees were exponential. Pay $10 the first year, $40 the second year, $160 the third year,.. $10,485,760 the tenth year, etc. The patent expires and goes to public domain the first year when the fee has not been not paid.
This way there'd be enough time to commercialize an invention for basically peanuts, so the small guy won't be dissuaded from doing so. OTOH holding on a patent for a very long time would only be possible if it brings gobs of money, end even so, only for a reasonably limited time, because on 15th year the fee would be $10,737,418,240.
The inevitable result of this will be spamming the system with basically-the-same patents every year. This article lists the cost to fight patents at $6,000 to $75,000 for each patent. It’ll be hard for small players to adversarially strike down 3,000 self-similar patents every year which block real innovation.
Yes, the patent office should do a better job of understanding their areas of expertise and prior art. In absence of that, perhaps the patent fees could go to a revenue-neutral system where successfully overturning patents as a private citizen results in getting a share of the total pool of filing and renewal fees.
The cure for the spam problem is to turn the incentives around in the patent examination process. Make it highly adversarial from the go and reward the patent office staff for rejecting applications, with solid argument trails. A good part of that would be to have the applicants submit their researched potential prior art and PROVE that their patent is actually novel. (If they haven't submitted a clearly discoverable piece of prior art and the examiner finds that out, that's an immediate rejection. With extreme prejudice, and preferably multiplied rejection award.)
It would still be gameable (everything is), but it would certainly curb the flood of copycat "X-but-in-domain-Y" patents once the pool of prior art used to reject crummy patents becomes better known and established. The additional pool of rejected applications then also feeds into the prior art foundations.
This is an excellent idea. I would still limit the time though. Also inflation should be taken into account (maybe) not that in 10 years 10M dollars is a chocolate.
I think that the exponent grows so fast that it completely dwarfs normal inflation. If the inflation goes out of hand, Zimbabwe-style, then I won't expect patent enforcement to matter or work either. But well, a term like 15-20 years could be added just in case.
Why not make it so there is a limit to how many patents you can hold? So if you have 10 patents, to register an 11th patent you need to release one of the patents you already have.
That would only protect those variations, not the previously published original version. And if the variations are too obvious you could even challenge their patents with a good chance of overturning them (which brings us back to the issue of the legal system being too slow and expensive)
I feel like patents are nowadays only used for things that would be easy to reverse-engineer or must be made public anyway. You can't recreate any modern technology by looking at patents, from semiconductor manufacturing to food processing.
So if patents have lost their original purpose, I don't see any value left in perpetuating the system.
Not to mention that patents are so (intentionally) difficult to understand that even patented technology is basically trade secrets now anyway. And the useful designs are protected by NDAs.
> it takes months of lawyers, just to understand if one idea we have is an infringement or not.
Even after that work, you don't know if your idea is infringing. All you have is a prediction on whether it will be found infringing if you are ever sued.
You can't put a NDA on a Patent. NDAs are basically the modern version of guilds. Imagine a world where absolutely everything about your job is kept under a strict NDA. This is true of startups, but it doesn't scale, especially once you start actually selling product and need to make customers happy to get the sale.
On the patent itself, no. But on design docs, CAD files, source code, circuit diagrams, etc. you can, and it is common practice to require NDAs for anyone who has access to them. And in some cases copyright law is also used to protect them.
> Imagine a world where absolutely everything about your job is kept under a strict NDA. This is true of startups, but it doesn't scale, especially once you start actually selling product and need to make customers happy to get the sale.
This is already a reality at many companies, including large ones.
It's much easier to spread information now than in the past. NDAs are slow leaks if you don't keep your employees tightly monitored at all times. Or if they play War Thunder.
Was really so (specifically “lethal”? Do you have sources?
I know trade secret was much more important. Also the spirit of patents is to allow development by making all public.
But do they?! I’m tired of trying to extract useful information off patents, they are empty of content and full of BS is laywer language. Real important details are kept secret, as long as possible.
The current system is de facto not working properly. I’m not saying is the worst, or I have better ideas, but is clear that the system is being heavily abused in all corners.
It could be lethal if a guild member attempted to share secrets or sell methods to a competitive guild. An example:
"In 1754 the State Inquisitors of Venice learned that a worker at Daniele Miotti's factory had fled abroad with a copy of his master's books. Fearing that he would divulge secrets—especially in Bohemia, where there were important glass factories—they ordered his death."
Source: Zecchin, P., (2025) “Una condanna a morte di dubbia utilità: Sarebbe stato molto grave, per i vetrai muranesi, se il seicentesco ricettario Miotti fosse caduto nelle mani dei Boemi?”, Journal of Glass Studies 66: 7. doi: https://doi.org/10.3998/jgs.6939
Just how widespread it was for violent and lethal actions to be carried out in pursuit of maintaining guild secrecy, the evidence is murky.
It seems pretty unlikely that guild secrets could be sustained against the modern internet in the absence of any legal protections. One disgruntled employee and your secrets are anonymously contributed to the Wikipedia article on your product.
> Glassmakers were not allowed to leave the island without permission from the government. Leaving without permission, or revealing trade secrets, was punishable by death
And what is wrong with competition? If someone else makes a product or service better than you - why should you get the benefits and not him/her?
The correct solution is to freely share all knowledge (IP). Open source is not perfect but it is a step in the right direction. P2P and torrents is another step in the right direction.
>It's telling that before the Patent system the solution was secretive guilds that jealously (sometimes lethally) guarded their secrets to avoid competition. This was obviously terrible since it greatly slowed down innovation.
Nowadays HFT technology is extremely competitive, with firms investing tens of millions in custom harder to achieve nanosecond latency improvements, but all this has happened entirely without patents. As an industry HFT is way less monopolised than tech, suggesting trade secrets alone are enough to achieve growth and competition.
I mean, with limiting the allowed use of force to guard secrets, we are probably nowhere near as at risk for the worst of the past? As you said, the competition to guard secrets could be quite severe, and they were not exactly good at knowing actual leaks of their secrets versus someone else independently arriving at them.
That is, I think having the assumption of independent discovery would go a long way to preventing abuse.
I could see some hazard that small shops can't protect their secrets from partner manufacturers and such. But that is exactly where we are with a lot of stuff today?
That is silly. My point was that we have better law enforcement period. Are we currently perfect? Of course not. But to use that as your argument is, amusingly, a silly premise for an argument.
Yes, that's why the people behind the United whistle blower "suicide" or the Epstein "suicide" we promptly brought to justice /s
Our law enforcement is "better" when it comes to enforcing the law against the lower 99%. When it comes to enforcing it against the kind of people who're actually likely to kill to protect their secrets...good luck
It's a factor, but I also wonder whether the key morpheme there isn't the "mega" in "megacorps". If, say, entity A attempting to enforce IP against entity B had to pay fees proportional to the size ratio (e.g., Megacorp enforcing against Little Joe's Software requires a $1 billion fee from Megacorp), things would be different.
The problem there is identifying the relevant entity, and I think that is the key. And it's not just a problem with IP, it's a problem with all property: it's just too easy for "real" beneficial ownership to be hidden so that penalties and enforcement can be accurately targeted at big market players. A few well-targeted such actions could loosen things up a lot.
Just ignore the size of the plaintiff and make everything depend on the size of the defendant. Is the defendant a huge megacorp? Make every inference against them. Is it a tiny small business? Give them every benefit of the doubt.
Then if megacorp tries to set up a tiny shell company to do their dirty work, you just ignore the shell company and sue the megacorp. Whereas if something is actually a small business, there is no megacorp hiding anywhere behind it.
How do you propose it could ever be otherwise? Under this system it's hard to sue small entities, but under any system it's generally useless to sue small entities except as a harassment mechanism because they don't have any money to pay damages anyway.
If IP laws and patent laws were created to protect right holders from abuse of bigger players on the market, and they are used to actually entrech those players...
This article just highlights it and shows how China weaponized this weakness of the west and is successfuly using it to pull ahead.
Meanwhile our own innovative companies and individuals get ground into dust by the boot of patent lawyers wielded by megacorps.