Wizard suing MtG clone for IP infringement

[Surgo]

There's no money in keeping a new idea secret.

There's this little thing called "trade secrets".

[schpeelah]

There's no money in keeping a new idea secret. Money incentivizes you to go public. You don't need a patent for that. Making more money incentivizes you to innovate that idea faster than other people. The incentives for innovation don't even stop there. You can become famous for inventing something new, recognition among peers, or in general is a thing people can use.

No, that's not what revealing an idea means in this context. You can be famous for inventing a telephone, but without patents, you are incentivised to do what you can to keep people from finding out how it works. A patent is a monopoly that replaces the natural monopoly held by someone who's simply the only one who knows what's inside their product. And we don't really want people to keep that secret.

[MGuy]

There's no money in keeping a new idea secret.

There's this little thing called "trade secrets".

Can you patent 'trade secrets'?

No, that's not what revealing an idea means in this context. You can be famous for inventing a telephone, but without patents, you are incentivised to do what you can to keep people from finding out how it works. A patent is a monopoly that replaces the natural monopoly held by someone who's simply the only one who knows what's inside their product. And we don't really want people to keep that secret.

If you release something people are going to figure out how it works. You're incentivized to keep people from learning how it works sure (you still aren't going to help them do so even with a patent) but if you're selling them how exactly are you going to keep them from doing that?

[Ancient History]

There's no money in keeping a new idea secret.

There's this little thing called "trade secrets".

Can you patent 'trade secrets'?

Sometimes.

[fectin]

If you release something people are going to figure out how it works. You're incentivized to keep people from learning how it works sure (you still aren't going to help them do so even with a patent) but if you're selling them how exactly are you going to keep them from doing that?

You mean like the composition of the mud that goes on baseballs?

[Ancient History]

You have time to bring up Baseball Rubbing Mud but not Farcast?

[MGuy]

I had to look up what the fuck that even was and even after doing so I still don't see why you asked it. Not only does that not answer my question but it doesn't justify a patent.

[codeGlaze]

Oh, side note about telecom and electric companies.
ONE fucking telephone pole is something like... 1500 to... 10,000 USD to replace.

I honestly have no idea what the fuck you are saying here. You can't just drop contextless numbers and expect them to impress people.

Here, let me show you: AT&T's 2013 net profit was 18 billion USD! [edit: what the hell? How did I lose the number in that sentence?] Are you persuaded yet? Of... something? Anything? It's certainly a very big number. That's got to count for something, right?

To be completely honest, I forget exactly what I was trying to point out.

Probably that most people have zero clue how much infrastructure, or anything really, actually costs these days.

To the main point on patents, though, I'm very aware of how they fuck us for long periods of time under the current setup. But isn't slightly naive to believe it's okay to allow people to just fuck the person/company that actually invested in the research/development costs? Would a patent system that allowed incremental change and/or direct copying be better if it also provided for percentage-based royalties to the create for... 5 or 10 years? Instead of providing a monopoly?

[Ancient History]

The whole point of patents and copyright is to provide an incentive for innovation and creativity. It's gotten ridiculously complicated and there are people and corporations that have fucked the system - Disney, patent trolls, etc. - but the basic principle is sound. If you don't have the legal protection for what you create, the incentive to improve declines.

[DSMatticus]

Monetizing invention through secrecy has a pretty shitty track record. The idea that it would be feasible today is outright laughable. Minecraft modding is a thing because everytime Mojang releases a new version a bunch of people decompile and deobfuscate the JAR for fun, and then they add a bunch of new code and features on top of that. If there is one thing you should take away from the last decade of piracy, it's that a bunch of amateurs and hobbyists with zero funding will crack your million dollar security systems for no reason other than it seeming like a good idea at the time.

On the pharmaceutical side of things, they are already required to disclose a huge amount of information on the basis of consumer safety. You can't sell a mystery pill without demonstrating to the public that the mystery contained therein isn't death by explosive diarrhea.

Reverse engineering isn't magic, but it's almost always trivially easy and inexpensive relative to the indirect costs of someone sitting on a patent for 20 years. I do not think patents could feasibly be replaced with secrecy in this day and age. I just think some for profit private research would stop, some of it wouldn't, public research would be almost totally unaffected, and the end result would be that a bunch of businesses would stop hurting and killing people by basing their business models around the discovery and artificial scarcity of life-improving and life-saving medication and medical devices.

Would a patent system that allowed incremental change and/or direct copying be better if it also provided for percentage-based royalties to the create for... 5 or 10 years? Instead of providing a monopoly?

Compulsory licensing sets an upper limit on how far you can fall behind competitively before people can profitably use your own patents in direct competition with you.

Consider: you have a patent for thingamajigs, but are required to license that patent to me unconditionally for 15% of my gross sales. If you set your prices high enough that I break even producing thingamjigs and paying for the license (either because my costs of production are lower or your prices are too high), then I can compete with you selling a direct imitation. If I add substantial value to the patent through my own innovation, then I can take that to market and see if customers agree that the value I've added is worth the higher prices from the licensing fee.

It's an improvement, but it is far from perfect:
1) There's still an asymmetric advantage. All you've really done is limit the extent to which that asymmetric advantage can create inefficiency. It's a band-aid on a fundamentally questionable approach.

2) Start-up costs for firms aren't actually zero. The patent holder can adjust prices downwards to kill competition, and then raise prices once they achieve a monopoly. The threat of that will keep the market a monopoly, because no one is going to pay the start-up costs for a business that will instantly stop being viable the second its doors open.

3) Development costs are a factor in cost of production, but only for the original developer. If the development costs for a product were low, then a high licensing rate is pure monopoly goodness. If the development costs for a product were high, then a low licensing rate makes it impossible to break even.

The better solution is to just publicly fund/socialize the fuck out of research. Society benefits when someone figures out a method to do something valuable, but society suffers if individuals can claim monopolies on those methods. As such, we should totally pay people to find methods to do valuable things, and we very much shouldn't hand out monopolies to anyone.

To some extent, innovation is its own reward. I don't mean that in a cheesy you'll-feel-fuzzy-in-your-heart way - I mean being familiar with technologies that are in demand adds value to you, as an individual, and the inventor of a god damn technology definitely has an advantage in that regard. But funding doesn't grow on trees and not every genius with a great idea is actually a genius with a great idea, so someone has to fork over that cash and take those risks. And that someone should probably just be "everyone."

[fectin]

We process it through December, I add my secret ingredient, and it’s ready to go.”

So, yes, it would be patentable.

[Surgo]

There's no money in keeping a new idea secret.

There's this little thing called "trade secrets".

Can you patent 'trade secrets'?

No, that's not what revealing an idea means in this context. You can be famous for inventing a telephone, but without patents, you are incentivised to do what you can to keep people from finding out how it works. A patent is a monopoly that replaces the natural monopoly held by someone who's simply the only one who knows what's inside their product. And we don't really want people to keep that secret.

If you release something people are going to figure out how it works. You're incentivized to keep people from learning how it works sure (you still aren't going to help them do so even with a patent) but if you're selling them how exactly are you going to keep them from doing that?

I don't know, why don't you ask the people behind Coca-Cola how they do it? That's the classic example of a trade secret.

[MGuy]

Aren't there a bunch of 'off brand' cola type drinks that taste if not exactly then almost the same?

[Drolyt]

Aren't there a bunch of 'off brand' cola type drinks that taste if not exactly then almost the same?

No.

[DSMatticus]

Coca-Cola's "trade secret" is a marketing strategy cooked up by the original inventor and owner, and every owner/executive since has ran the same strategy while steadily incrementing the "let me tell you how old our super secret formula for our super awesome soda is..." counter. The actual formula they use has been leaked several times over, including a copy straight out of the inventor's diary. Of course, the formula also isn't static, and they likely incrementally modify it all the goddamn time to account for changing costs and availability. Biggest example: they sure as hell don't put cocaine in it anymore. More subtly: it's cheaper to get sugar from corn than sugarcane in the U.S., so that is what they do.

But honestly? No one gives a fuck about knowing how to make Coca-Cola. Coca-Cola's value doesn't come from the product - it comes from their advertising and distribution. They have spent a huge sum of money making sure you know what Coca-Cola is, and they convince businesses to sign deeply uncompetitive, almost trust-like distribution deals. And then they rake in money on brand recognition and mini-pseudo-monopolies. If you knew how to make a perfect copy of Coca-Cola for half the price you still wouldn't have a business model that could go toe to toe with them.

[MGuy]

Aren't there a bunch of 'off brand' cola type drinks that taste if not exactly then almost the same?

No.

Pepsi, RC, 'Cola' (of several off brands), etc? They are all pretty samey. Same look, similar tastes (I know people that can barely tell the difference between pepsi and coca cola). But whatever. I'm not really up on who has what patents or whatever.

[Drolyt]

Aren't there a bunch of 'off brand' cola type drinks that taste if not exactly then almost the same?

No.

Pepsi, RC, 'Cola' (of several off brands), etc? They are all pretty samey. Same look, similar tastes (I know people that can barely tell the difference between pepsi and coca cola). But whatever. I'm not really up on who has what patents or whatever.

I don't drink much soda anymore, but Pepsi and Coke taste very different. Pepsi is much sweeter and has a citrus flavor, Coke has more bite and has a sort of vanilla taste to it. Yes people have a hard time telling them apart in blind taste tests, but people suck in blind taste tests period, that isn't proof of anything. Most people seriously cannot tell the difference between chicken and steak in a blind taste test.

[Surgo]

Coca-Cola's "trade secret" is a marketing strategy cooked up by the original inventor and owner, and every owner/executive since has ran the same strategy while steadily incrementing the "let me tell you how old our super secret formula for our super awesome soda is..." counter. The actual formula they use has been leaked several times over, including a copy straight out of the inventor's diary. Of course, the formula also isn't static, and they likely incrementally modify it all the goddamn time to account for changing costs and availability. Biggest example: they sure as hell don't put cocaine in it anymore. More subtly: it's cheaper to get sugar from corn than sugarcane in the U.S., so that is what they do.

But honestly? No one gives a fuck about knowing how to make Coca-Cola. Coca-Cola's value doesn't come from the product - it comes from their advertising and distribution. They have spent a huge sum of money making sure you know what Coca-Cola is, and they convince businesses to sign deeply uncompetitive, almost trust-like distribution deals. And then they rake in money on brand recognition and mini-pseudo-monopolies. If you knew how to make a perfect copy of Coca-Cola for half the price you still wouldn't have a business model that could go toe to toe with them.

All of this is true, and none if it really changes my point that trade secrets are a real thing.

[MGuy]

I never questioned that they were real. Just didn't know if they actually patent trade secrets.

[Kaelik]

For the most part, no they don't. Because Trade secrets are things that you are worried about other people finding out, because then they will copy you, so for example, the secret ingredient is X is a trade secret, because you can't patent the idea of adding X.

But patents, you use on things you could never possibly keep secret in the first place. So "this is my brand of cellphone" is patented, because your competitor can just rip open the phone trace all the circuitry, and figure it out themselves.

[Surgo]

I never questioned that they were real. Just didn't know if they actually patent trade secrets.

No, that would defeat the point of secrecy.

A good example of trade secrets is the RC4 algorithm. It's a stream cipher, essentially a pseudo-random number generator. Historically, it was used as one of the encryption algorithms that protect wireless network traffic. It has taken some damage from a number of cryptographic attacks and its use is generally considered deprecated (though it's unclear if it's completely broken or not).

Anyway, RC4 was originally a trade secret but someone back in the 90s leaked a copy of the algorithm to a cryptography mailing list (if this whole episode sounds bizarre, understand that people used to keep cryptographic algorithms proprietary instead of open... it was a weird time). At that point RC4 was fair game to use -- there was nothing preventing its use besides its secrecy, which had been breached. The only thing you could not do at the time was use the actual name RC4, as that (I believe) was trademarked -- instead, the name "Arcfour" was used to describe its implementation.

[kzt]

There are provisions to patent secrets. Yes, that sounds a bit crazy, but it's true.
http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mpep/s115.html

[MGuy]

So what happens if someone 'accidentally' does whatever secret thing you did? Can you sue over that?

[Surgo]

Remember that IANAL but -- with a trade secret, you can do whatever you want (within legal means) to try to figure it out and use it yourself. People used chemical means to figure out what exactly went into Coca-Cola all the time.

[ACOS]

So what happens if someone 'accidentally' does whatever secret thing you did? Can you sue over that?

I'm pretty sure you can.
Patents are part of the public record, and there's even a form you can fill out for the USPO to see if what you made already has a patent.
Basically, you have a duty to make sure you're not infringing on someone else's work.