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How about both? You are welcome to critique my opinion.

As for assumption 3, there's SpaceX. They don't open their design of their rockets to the public where their competitors, such as the Chinese can copy them. Neither the US government nor SpaceX wants that. So there's a large amount of innovations, probably countless designs that went into these rockets. Maybe in a better geopolitical situation, patents would be respected, but why would SpaceX gives everyone the blueprint to catch up? Patents make more sense if designs are easily reverse engineered and you still want a monopoly to make back your investment. That is clearly false as people have made innovation in 3D printing where new designs are standardized for the benefit of the whole market.

Assumption 4 is the defacto state of things even if it were not the intention. People who invent useful things for the sake of useful things are clearly at a disadvantage against corporations or entities who have more money to hire lawyers.

There's already at least one case of a trivial patent for 3D printing stronger layers that expired being repatented again by another company, increasing legal uncertainty from implementing the technique in slicers and other software. Most slicer these days are open source, generally don't make money for its developers(at least not directly), but they do grow the 3D printing market through its active development. The slicers also happen to share code, unsurprising given that they are forks of one another. Clearly, this model is incompatible with the patent system as it stands.

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tastyfreeze a day ago | parent [-]

On the SpaceX example, they couldn't release their designs even if they wanted to. ITAR prohibits it.

If they weren't prohibited from sharing rocket technology SpaceX might share. Tesla patents are open. I don't see why Musk wouldn't do the same for SpaceX if the government allowed it.

	▲	kiba a day ago \| parent [-]
		I don't see Musk doing that as he directly stated it himself. As for Tesla patents, I would speculate that it's more about companies not willing copy Tesla which is why Telsa doesn't really care if they open source the information. Copying isn't always so easy especially if there are structural issues involved. Recall the superchargers that became standard. Other companies were using a different connector, but the supercharger connector was obviously superior and they relented after many years. Patents are more useful in situation in which your designs are easily reverse engineered and there's little barrier in copying. In any case, there are firms in the automative industry that specialized in doing the teardown of cars and doing cost estimation. Such a firm would tell their competitors how Tesla actually make their cars, so there's not much value in publishing their patents anyway, other than PR stunts. Patents are not as useful in scenarios in which trade secrets provide a strong and durable barrier to entry. They also require lawsuits to enforce, which is rather costly and imposes cost on our economy, so there's inefficiency to consider as well. Theoretically, a monopoly in this instance would incentivize R&D effort but we know that monopolies has various nasty side effects and not everybody have money to hire lawyers and enforce them.