Sure, the original invention may be available, but in the meantime, new patents were filed for improvements and refinements. Without those, the original patent cannot be made efficiently or cost effective. Plus, the new patents can be weaponized in the courts to drain the resources of anyone experimenting in the area.

In other words, patents as implemented effectively enable indefinite monopolies. This may not be true for all patents, but this seems to be a standard playbook these days.

As a competitor, you can also try taking the 20-year old product and refining it differently, too. Or if you're aggressive, you can build and refine current competitive products and patent the refinements, but you can't sell the product without a license, so might not be great (otoh, you might trade licensing the refinement for licensing the base product)

Not really—the point of patents is to publish information so that others can use it after a period of exclusivity. But if you can keep filing patents, preventing others from using that information indefinitely, then it defeats the purpose of the patent system.

If you look at video compression, by the time a patented algorithm expires, there's tended to be a new codec that's better, but you can use mpeg-2 as you like now. So we get the incentive to make better codecs, and we get the old codecs.

What in these patents would be locked away in a trade secret? They seem to be things you can figure out just by playing the game, or thinking about how it might be implemented. There's no secrets here.

Seems like mainly a net loss.

If the examiner and patent office screw up and allow a claim that shouldn’t have been allowed, then the claim can be challenged later and revoked. Yes, that costs money and is inefficient sometimes.

> If the claims are non-novel or obvious, then the examiners, who are familiar with the state of the art in the field, will reject them.

Which displays a stunning level of naivety and lack of familiarity with our patent system. Patents are regularly granted for extremely trivial (edit: and obvious) mechanisms.

And the patent process is not optimized to produce documents that actually help other inventors or future historians. In fact, to the contrary, as it exists within a particular narrow legal IP regime that optimizes around legal risk. This is especially the case with software patents, where the patent office incentivizes patents that use convoluted language to make an obvious process seem like a novel invention.

In other words, let's assume a future where there are no more copies of Zelda to play. If you had to choose between getting to preserve the patent on the Zelda loading screen and an actual recording of it, I'll take the recording every time. Or in a future where much of the knowledge of computer science and programming was lost, I'd rather have an archive of a set of textbooks, Stack Overflow, and Github than the entirety of the patent office's software patent documents.

First, you misstate the purpose of disclosure. It isn't to become a record of historical inventions, it's to encourage inventors to disclose their innovations, as inventors otherwise would not disclose their inventions. Inventors and their businesses would instead be incentivized to wrap their inventions up in trade secret and never disclose anything at all.

Second, patents don't use convoluted language to hide an obvious process. That's (a) merely facial and a waste of time, (b) contrary to the actual legal goal of patents which is to encompass as much in your patent as possible, while still maintaining its ability to grant. Patentees must actually disclose their invention, in a way that's cognizable to someone skilled in the art, or they simply do not have any benefit from the patent at all.

In the past there was perhaps more benefit from this exchange: manufacturers disclosed special knowledge of their products in patents and the world at large gained knowledge that would otherwise remain secret. But this theoretical exchange breaks down if the secret is easily reverse engineered or otherwise unlikely to remain secret. Reverse engineering all manner of products is much easier now than it was 100 years ago but the duration of patents has remained fixed at 20 years. I doubt that it would take more than a year to reverse engineer these patented Zelda features (or how to make a new small molecule drug, for that matter) in the absence of disclosure through patents.

There's still an argument for patents to incentivize investment in R&D. We still want people to invest the time and effort in developing and proving new small molecule drugs even though modern instrumentation and synthesis planning makes it easy to copy a drug. But the "disclosure is better than secrets" argument in favor of patents has been weakening every year as secret-keeping becomes harder.

That is practically always before patents expire.

Truly smart innovations will survive over time. Obvious "inventions" are often trivial enough to be "invented" independently again & again.

Patents mostly add a load of red tape, and a big stick that large companies (& patent trolls!) can hit smaller companies or individuals with.

Overall benefit to society, even if patents work as intended? Debateable (and forever being debated, eg. between economists).

In a small society, an inventor taking solution-to-big-problem into their grave, is a problem. In a world with 8 billion+ souls, not so much. Someone else will repeat what 1st inventor didn't release into the world.

Companies innovate because they want to grab market share by getting there first. Losing 'protection' doesn't stop this process. It just removes that big stick that would-be competitors are beaten down with.

The book opens up with a case of James Watt (after whom the Watt SI units are named), and that even though he came up with the steam engine, only after the patent for steam engine expired, was the world able to benefit from his invention. Most of the time while patent was active, he was busy fighting off others, trying to extract financial gain (AFAIK). Not only that, his initial design was subpar, and the improvement that was important was actually patented by somebody else.

I would like to finish the book someday though...

Could you identify what patent that is? I hope I will get a genuine response from someone who genuinely knows that industry because the last time I asked I just got a patents.google.com/search?q=eink response. It is fun to blame patents. But that's like saying we're not making progress in operating systems because Microsoft owns a key patent in operating systems.

Since the system exists for the benefit of humanity, I assume that is baked into the process?

I'm talking more about the practical act of sitting down and reading a patent. They are long, boring, and filled with legalese. A patent may be 50 pages long, but the interesting part may fill no more than a few paragraphs and be described using nouns and verbs you've never heard before. It's completely possible to read a patent, look at the pictures, and still have no idea what the thing actually is.

It's essentially legal abstraction -- inventors and patent attorneys don't want to be pinned down to a particular interpretation, implementation, or embodiment.