[ocfnash]

I salute your intention to find the silver lining but my experience reading patents is that they are hard to read. I believe this is because their job is not to convey information but rather to fulfill a legal requirement. I also believe that less restriction of these "inventions" would lead to a greater proliferation of truly useful explanations. No doubt there are exceptions but this has been my experience.

[dmonitor]

they're incentivized to be vague because specificity decreases the utility of the patent.

[Melatonic]

Sounds like a great opportunity for someone to make an AI that is designed to "decrypt" patents into their actual useful parts (minus the legal stuff basically)

[freejazz]

That would probably not be the case as companies would be obligated to wrap anything up in trade secret and never disclose anything.

[yccs27]

With trade secrets, you can still independently discover them later. With patents, you have to check your own inventions on whenther they infringe patents, which is kind of ridiculous.

[mcphage]

> companies would be obligated to wrap anything up in trade secret and never disclose anything

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.