No, everyone benefits when the patent is published, because you can start studying how the invention worked. Of course this doesn't really apply to method patents that describe abstract solutions, which is why they are so terrible.
> The only possible countermeasure is to have critical patents yourself and play a game of dissuasion, or throw yourself into Mutually Assured Litigation.
The spirit of the patent system is not that you can/must form patent pools, but that you are forced to invent a different, and hopefully better, product. If nobody can come up with an improvement within a limited period of time, then this could be taken as proof that your solution is the best one, and thus everyone should have access to it. The reward to the inventor is simply part of the mechanism that causes things to be improved, it is not the entirety of it.
> No, everyone benefits when the patent is published, because you can start studying how the invention worked
Fair point.
> The spirit of the patent system is not that you can/must form patent pools, but that you are forced to invent a different, and hopefully better, product. If nobody can come up with an improvement within a limited period of time, then this could be taken as proof that your solution is the best one
This is the theory, but practice differs wildly. More often than not you're not coming up with another, unrelated and possibly marginally better solution, but progressing by varying increments (standing on the solders of giants). Part of your improved solution could very well be found to be subject to the initial patent, either upfront when application is rejected, or later on when legally challenged. So a very real scenario is that you are simply forced to reinvent a wheel as being square when you should be focusing on improving a round one. As such maybe nobody could come up with an improvement precisely because nobody researched such a solution in the first place in fear of outrageous patent licensing costs on the parent method, or fear of litigation afterwards, both of which would simply make your research investment void.
No, everyone benefits when the patent is published, because you can start studying how the invention worked. Of course this doesn't really apply to method patents that describe abstract solutions, which is why they are so terrible.
> The only possible countermeasure is to have critical patents yourself and play a game of dissuasion, or throw yourself into Mutually Assured Litigation.
The spirit of the patent system is not that you can/must form patent pools, but that you are forced to invent a different, and hopefully better, product. If nobody can come up with an improvement within a limited period of time, then this could be taken as proof that your solution is the best one, and thus everyone should have access to it. The reward to the inventor is simply part of the mechanism that causes things to be improved, it is not the entirety of it.