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To: Peter V who wrote (229582)	11/20/2009 8:16:29 PM
From: neolib	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 306849

The public benefit is indeed the disclosure part, and the assumption that this promotes more rapid development. You are free in the USA to skip patents, and instead guard your invention as a trade secret. If you choose that route, you have no recourse if someone reverse engineers your idea or if they independently invent it. If its been more than 1 year since you commercialised it, you can't patent it either. Trade secrets tend to be used more for process or manufacturing methods where the details can be kept in house. But employees might talk... While the USA is "first to invent" in theory, in practice it is first to file, because there are significant hurdles to overturning an issued patent. I've looked into it on several occasions. In the last year or so both the USPTO & some court decisions have actually started to improve this option. The real problem in the USA patent system is that over time the "nonobvious" clause has been badly neglected. If several teams of designers would all arrive at mutually infringing results when presented with a design challenge, then the common base of solutions should not be patentable. Again, recent court decisions from last year (and some now pending in the SC) have started to correct this issue. I hope the trend continues. I patent things only to protect myself from suits over trivial issues. In that sense the patent system has become nothing but paying protection money against rackateers. Some reading on the subject: Google "submarine patent", "means clause", "Jerome Lemelson" The latter idiot was quite the disaster for a lot of industries. Again, fortunately the courts have corrected some of these issues. I hope they keep working on it.