>I don't understand how it could be called a competitive advantage when you have to run to the law to fend off your competitors.
The whole point of the patent system is to encourage people not to maintain trade secrets - to share their developments and in exchange be guaranteed time in which someone is not allowed to compete on that front. You're giving up practical ability to defend your advantage, on the understanding that the law will pick up the slack.
>If your product can be 'reverse engineered' just by looking at them, good luck with that, chances it was obvious in the first place
Sophistry. Look at Velcro: it's easy to see how it works on examination, but it was a damned clever idea, and not remotely obvious.
What is so bad about trade secrets? You either share or keep to yourself. Sharing something then prohibiting others from replicating it is just pretending that there is a cake you could eat, but you are forbidden to do so.
I agree we have a different definition for obvious, but I would argue that mine is at least very straightforward. If you think your idea is novel but very simple, you have to go a step further and find out how to monetize it better than others. I think it is my responsibility to protect my interests e.g. trying to keep it a secret by obfuscating the code. We do this all the time in software.
Nothing in particular, but there are lots of times when it's useful to a society for people not to keep them.
Patents generally last a little over a decade, after which competitors are free to use them. If you keep your developments secret, they could stay secret for decades, which means decades in which competitors couldn't study, improve upon, fix your ideas. It slows the pace of progress, or so the argument goes.
You can agree or disagree with the sentiment, but I don't think it can be dismissed out of hand.
>you have to go a step further and find out how to monetize it
I think this comes back to society's interest, as all discussions of patents must.
It's not necessarily in society's interest for you to withhold developments until you find a way to protect them.
What if drug manufacturers refused to sell drugs, only dispensing them on location, for fear of others stealing their secrets?
What if someone came up with an idea like Velcro, to hark back, and never developed it, seeing the cost and realising that the IP could never be protected. Would we be better off?
I would like to believe the answer is yes, but to be honest I'm not so sure. I don't think patents are the main driving force of innovation and research, and we would come to a halt without them. But even if they are, when you are the first to come up with an idea you are still in the best position to turn a profit off it without patents. Sure, your margins might be smaller, but society as a whole should benefit from a more competitive environment, compared to squeezing every drop of money to a single company.
From previous discussions I took away big pharma R&D and PR cost breakdown is usually very sad. You can defend a case like Solvadi, that Gilead is entitled to maximize their profits, but it is not in society's best interest after all, as I think it is not directly looped back into innovation.
The whole point of the patent system is to encourage people not to maintain trade secrets - to share their developments and in exchange be guaranteed time in which someone is not allowed to compete on that front. You're giving up practical ability to defend your advantage, on the understanding that the law will pick up the slack.
>If your product can be 'reverse engineered' just by looking at them, good luck with that, chances it was obvious in the first place
Sophistry. Look at Velcro: it's easy to see how it works on examination, but it was a damned clever idea, and not remotely obvious.