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I've dealt with patents to some extent in my work, so I guess my comment is the approach one takes with patents depends on one's resources + objectives... sometimes pure secrecy is the best choice, other times not... one thing is for sure though, patents are not enforced by the state, at least around here! You need the cash to fight the legal battle or there's not much point owning a patent!
A good example of what can happen: I read about a small company that developed + patented a new sort of sports whistle + was doing alright selling it. A large Chinese company copied it from the patent and undercut the original manufacturer driving them out of the market. The original manufacturer did not have the resources to win the (drawn out) court case and failed to get the Chinese company out of the protected market + iirc went out of business... They might have been better off without a patent since they did not have the resources to enforce it. That said, even without a patent to refer to, simple things, like a whistle, can be reverse engineered reasonably cost effectively...
A whistle is one thing, but in other domains (eg high tech) the development costs are much higher... Secrecy is critical (and I agree, the worth of NDA's and patents should be up to the company, not the state to protect, + lawsuits are very effective in that regard), but often patent protection is also an important tool...
While you are right that copycats can copy copycats and drive down profit margins, and copycats are not so likely to get rich, a world that allows that doesn't give much incentive for people to develop new things and it does not necessarily give enough disincentive to dissuade copycats (especially in China it seems!)... one needs enough profit margin to recover development costs. If one has sufficient resources, a set of patents can provide protection to prevent copies from reaching critical markets, + that can be a reasonable approach to recover costs... that said, there are anticompetitive things one can do with patents as well (depending how one looks at it)... IP is a game really...
James...
posted by 69.63.5...
, Thu, 6 Jan 2011 23:03:23
, Fri, 7 Jan 2011 15:31:58, Fri, 7 Jan 2011 16:23:21, Sun, 9 Jan 2011 03:24:46
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