Patents are Chinese instruction manuals, say Palmer Luckey, founder of defense company Anduril.
"The founding fathers never predicted a world where you would have a globalized economy where the entire patent office could be downloaded every single morning and then ripped off and used to fight a war against you," Palmer Luckey said on the Hoover Institution's Uncommon Knowledge in May.
The patent system was built on a bargain. An inventor filed a complete description of how his invention worked, the government published it, and in exchange he got a limited time as the only person allowed to sell it. The inventor got paid. The public eventually got the knowledge. For two centuries, the deal worked — partly because of the law, but mostly because of a shared culture among American and European companies generally treated copying as shameful. Courts enforced contracts. Competitors who stole each other's work got sued and paid up. Most companies decided licensing was cheaper than stealing.
China does not share that culture, and the bargain has tilted, Luckey says. "China can just rip it off right away, and Western companies can only rip it off after 20 years."
The problem runs deeper than intellectual property (IP). The United States no longer makes most of what it invents. American companies design products and send the specifications to Chinese factories to be built. The factories work first shift for the US client and the night shift for themselves.
Luckey wants the patent system itself overhauled. He proposes a massive expansion of classified patents exclusivity without disclosure. Many of Google's artificial intelligence patents, he argues, should never have been published at all.
Rick Good spent ten years in the newspaper business, including with The News & Observer (Raleigh, NC) and The Greenville News (Greenville, SC). He co-wrote, with Melinda Coleman, Rutledge to Riley: Governors of South Carolina, 1776–Present (Published by The Greenville News), and is the author of Mind Games Trivia #1 (Amazon). He has recently spent 15 years creating original trivia content through Sounds Good Mobile Entertainment and continues that with his new company, SGME Software. He edits The Smart Reader’s money, real estate, and business coverage.
