Reddit mentions of Patent Failure: How Judges, Bureaucrats, and Lawyers Put Innovators at Risk

Pharm does seems to be the outlier in all things patent. Managers in other industries do not rank patent protection as crucial to their development processes as often as pharma managers do. There are a lot of statistics, but I find that one to be a good way to take the average temperature and figure out what might happen if we suddenly cut the system. Bessen & Meurer is still probably the best one-stop-shop for all the basic empirical results in the literature, including that one. They'll point you toward anything more specific (in journals) you want.

The big, if obvious, reason is clinical trials. You absolutely cannot hold onto most, if any, trade secrets once you move into the clinical phases. Your major secrets are going to come out at least to the FDA in your IND application. Even if you could theoretically keep a tighter seal on Phase I participants, medical staff, etc, you've got your clock ticking to file for any patent rights and a long way to go until market. Patenting is going to be the only way you can keep a credible hold on any projected market profits 7-10 years out, justifying either your own internal R&D budgeting or VC/Angel funding. And they're going to be patenting every tidbit of utility leading up to and through the clinicals.

Inventors in other industries can appeal to trade secrets for significantly longer. Sometimes up until it's ready to come to market or at least until they're ready move into prototyping. In larger inventive projects where we may have a harder time with real big secrets, the firm (or the project) can often sit more comfortably on a broad "genus" patent too until later in the development when the spit out a tighter "species" patent right before the innovation hits shelves. In any event, they needed less of a death grip on the patent system to pull them through the R&D, so they view it as "less critical" than the pharma industry.

Theoretically then it's less clear what Non-Pharma would do without them. They probably just dig deeper into secrecy. Since that's not going to be possible for pharma...that's the trouble spot. But, since WTO signatory countries have to provide patent protection, it's a purely academic question. Treaty obligations are pretty darn solid.

It seems we're talking past each other because our experiences are so different. I'll reiterate that my statements apply to software patents, which perhaps are very different from fields where patents represent "months or years" of research. Many of the software patents I've encountered represent a trivial amount of research - measured in hours or days, not months or years. I'd attribute this to the fact that anyone competent in the field can get 3-4x the salary of a patent examiner by working as a software engineer.

Here's a good book that provides a large amount of empirical evidence in support of my claims:

Patent Failure: How Judges, Bureaucrats, and Lawyers Put Innovators at Risk