Alot of patents and inventions get bought and "Vaulted" by the government or Corporations if it would mean they lose profit. Great ideas forever hidden, just so some fat cat doesn't lose revenue or gain competition.
So first of all, every patent that is issued is published and publicly available. Every* patent expires 20ish years after it was first filed. When a patent expires, anyone can use the invention.
All* patents that are currently in force have maintenance fees that need to be paid 4, 7, and 12 years after issuance. Patents that aren’t valuable don’t get their maintenance fees paid and enter the public domain sooner than 20 years.
*things have changed a bit over time, but except for a very small number of weird edge cases this is true for patents currently in force.
You don’t have to believe I am who I say I am, but help me out. Do you disagree that patents publish and are publicly available? Do you disagree that patents expire? Do you disagree about maintenance fees?
Can you show me where the government is buying patents?
You say they’re “vaulted” if they don’t produce a profit. I mean it’s true… people don’t build things that cost more to make than they can be sold for.
And I have lots of nuanced criticisms of the patent system. I know about patent trolls and defensive patents and patent thickets and all that. But almost nobody is spending the money (and patents are expensive) to get a patent on something that people want to buy and then refusing to exchange that pent up demand for money. Sometimes (or arguably always) patents are used to prop up artificially high prices, but GM isn’t hiding a water powered car because it would make Exxon mad. And if they were, they certainly wouldn’t file a patent on it.
I can't show you info I don't have. Just like you don't have the evidence to denounce what I'm proposing, I don't have the evidence to corroborate it either. All I can say is the government and corporations have disappeared people befor, so why is this idea so far fetched?
One fun quirk of patents is they’re sequentially numbered so if bunches of them go missing, that’s pretty easily detectable. And there are people monitoring this stuff.
See the thing is, not everything is available. You'd be daft to think that you can google things, that rich and powerful people don't want you to find, if it were that ez we'd know what epstein was up to or what China was planning next etc. If they don't want you to know, you won't, or if you do you disappear.
Let’s say Big Oil buys up and vaults a patent on super efficient solar panels. Whatever.
Now, 5 years later, some researchers at Stanford stumble across the same invention. What’s the mechanism Big Oil is going to use to shut down those researchers? They can sue. That’s how patent rights are enforced. But they can only do that if the patent right is public and the lawsuit is filed in public in a federal court room that has public access and it shows up in dozens of digests of patent litigation, and before you know it TechDirt has a blog post up.
... So rich/powerful squashes an idea, thus silencing a group with a similar idea. Thus proving what I'm saying about public patents but we already covered that. But who said Big Oil hasn't done that 100 times already or hell the government, to hundreds of other patents ( using the word patent to generalize an idea made public ) or an invention that never made it to the patent phase? Who said the rich and powerful are playing by the rules at all? Your looking at the small pictures but you gotta step back and look at the big pic... wait you can't because every bit of information you can aquire outside off seeing it for yourself is filtered so you see what they want you too. That's my point. NO ONE TRUELY KNOWS, but you gotta be an idiot if you think it isn't happening.
Wow, there is so much going on here it’s Jewish space lasers levels of paranoia. The Chain Reaction movie is not, in fact, a documentary.
Ok, let’s start with this—you just significantly moved the goal posts. We’re retreating from parents, which every post previously was about to “ideas” now, huh? The reason for this is obvious, you have no idea how any of this works, and every item of your ignorance becomes evidence for your thesis. Yes, every bit of evidence points to there being no shadowy conspiracy. Like if I can pull up patent number 12,985,447 and 12,985,449 on google patents (and I can) but 12,985,448 is missing someone is going to notice. I use at least four services that scrape and collate every single patent that issues every single Tuesday (the one day of the week new patents issue) and make them (more) searchable and accessible. If patents are dropping out of the public domain, lawyers who charge exorbitant hourly rates to know what’s going on with the patent system would notice. Academics like Mark Lemley who have built their careers on understanding trends and recognizing quirks of the patent office would publish so much good stuff about it.
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
Your pivot to “ideas” actually makes your big idea that this happening in the shadows so, so much worse. Because there’s no reason for it to happen in the shadows, it’s happening in broad daylight. Google announces its acquisition of Applied Semantics (now AdSense) to much fanfare. There were whole books written about Bill Gates embrace, extend, extinguish MO. Exxon’s acquisition of Pioneer Natural Resources is written up in the Wall Street Journal.
So there are a ton of deals happening that reduces competition and centralizes IP. The problem here is that it doesn’t allow for hiding secret inventions. Because we see how this works when Google buys Nest. We see the transparency. And when previous cool ideas wither in the vine we see it. What’s the motivation for someone to do this to climate saving solar power in secret? How does Exxon keep literally thousands of people silent when they have tons of motivation to come clean. Hiring that academic out of Stanford doesn’t actually do anything to stop the researcher from Aalborg from reinventing and publishing. In fact if it’s secret, that second research definitionally cannot know that he’s not supposed to publish. And I’ve got a pretty good idea how powerful Exxon is. But they can’t shut down researchers in Shanghai.
So yeah, companies are horse trading IP. Some of that is bad for consumers. But there’s no “big idea” being concealed from you. It’s all so much more boring than that.
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u/[deleted] Mar 05 '25
Alot of patents and inventions get bought and "Vaulted" by the government or Corporations if it would mean they lose profit. Great ideas forever hidden, just so some fat cat doesn't lose revenue or gain competition.