Quote:
Originally Posted by fjtorres
What's wrong with a company patenting a product they designed?
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Nothing.
But a company keeping a stealth patent for a very trivial "design" hidden until a competitor independently designs and markets such a product, then springing it as a weapon to stifle competition, is very, very wrong.
The purpose -- the original purpose -- of patents is to keep trade secrets from being lost, and knowledge from being hidden, by offering a limited monopoly in exchange for publishing the details of an invention, so that it is public record forever and so that other inventors can study it and learn from it. They were never intended to be weapons to use against another company instead of competing fairly with it in the marketplace. The one-click patent, to pick on a previous Amazon demonstration of their preference for litigation over competition, is a perfect example of what patents are
not meant for.
One of the major changes to the law needs to be that if you've kept your patent application secret -- as Amazon did, in this case -- then you have no recourse against someone who produced an "infringing" product before your patent was known or could be known. It does not "promote the progress of science and the useful arts" when the rights to anything you invent, and anything you earn from it, could be ripped from you because of a secret patent that you had no way of knowing about when you marketed your invention. How can you run a business if you can't even be sure that your inventions will be
yours tomorrow morning, through no fault of your own and nothing you could possibly foresee?