In reading a current thread about the patent processI wondered how a company with say a formula or manufacturing process for “x” product that outperforms the competition can patent the new process or formula and still keep the process or formulation secret?
If a patent is published doesn’t it have to detail what the product contains and how it is made?
You can’t. Part of the tradeoff for getting a 20-year monopoly is that you must disclose how the invention works.
I just attended a meeting about the tradeoffs between having a patented process/formula/design and an industrial secret. If it’s something that can be easily reverse-engineered there’s some point in getting a patent, but otherwise it might not be worth the trouble and the only 20 year protection (which is itself limited. If someone infringes, it’s not as if the government is going to step in and stop them. You have to sue them yourself. But the patent gives you a powerful leg to stand on, unless your opponent challenges it)
Coca Cola didn’t release its formula – it’s still a company secret and unpatented. In this age of gas chromatography and sensitive chemical analysis, it’s likely that anyone with deep enough pockets and an interest already knows what;'s in Coke anyway. But, as the Master says, there’s no point in marketing something identical to Coke. So Pepsi, for instance, has a similar but not identica;l formula.
What if I know no one will ever figure it out?
What if I develop a battery pack with 10 times the energy density achievable today for 1/10th the manufacturing cost, size, and weight?
Can I just sell the product and make billions or will the government eventually make me fess up and disclose the process?
If you want to go the route of keeping your invention secret, then you run the risk that if someone else patents it, you might be infringing that patent. Therefore what you do is ‘publicly disclose’ the invention by printing it in a little-known language, in a foreign country’s newspaper (eg, print it in Burmese in an Côte d’Ivoire Newspaper).
Then if anyone tries to patent it and then sue you for infringement, you can invalidate the patent by showing that it was publicly disclosed many years ago and therefore not novel.
Sneaky.
But useless. If you document your process you can demonstrate prior art, no need to publish.
It’s usually a choice of keeping it proprietary and secret forever, or patenting it and trying to defend your patent in court for 20 years.
Most companies choose the former if what they’re doing is truly innovative and worth keeping secret. From what I can tell, patents tend to cover things more along the lines of basic research done by companies more than manufacturing processes or component/ingredient lists. The idea being, that if one of their researchers figures something out that they don’t know what to do with, they can patent it and not have to worry about their competitors using that idea.
Manufacturing processes can be particularly worthless at times, because it can be difficult to prove a violation.
I’m the proud originator of a few trade secrets at my current company. Manufacturing improvements that are technically patentable, but things we’d never be able to tell if someone else is doing as well. So instead of publishing them as part of the patent, we just document it internally.
A prior secret invention can be problematic as prior art for the purposes of invalidation. Greater probative value my way. For prior private knowledge to become prior art the knowledge must be transferred.
The fellow who invented liquid soap died recently. I don’t know whether he patented it, but to get a year’s sales without competition he ordered 10million pumps from the only company that could make them, securing a monopoly for a while! Sold out later to a big company.
Wouldn’t moving it from the lab to factories count as a transfer? Specially if there are several factories involved, even in multiple countries. The factories in Taipei and Sidney didn’t suddenly start making the new product, the knowledge was transferred to them, and it was a succesul transfer - whereas something published in a Cote d’Ivoire newspaper in Burmese was not much of a transfer, since nobody received the knowledge.