Why not ?
It's no longer a trade secret, somebody else has re-invented it.
The manufacturer could step forward and disclose their trade secret.
The secret is in the products itself which is prove of prior art yet nobody
noticed it
By disclosing their trade secret they should be able to prove that they are
infact the original inventors.
Surely that has to count for something in court
The patent and copyright systems are protectionist legislation intended to
try to enforce some degree of fairness over profit from intellectual
property and innovation. Nobody ever claimed they were perfect.
The obvious point of patents is to protect an inventor who has
invested a great deal of capital to develop an idea into an invention
with some practical use which might be sold at profit from scalpers
who simply copy the design without having to invest any of the R&D
capital and can thus undercut the price of the inventor who needs
to recover these costs through sales.
At this level, it's the same notion as forbidding the counterfeiting
of money. Why earn it when you can just print what you need?
Someone said the notion of patents was to encourage inventors to
disclose ("open source") their inventions, but I do not believe this
to be the case. The system is merely an artifact of a capitalist
economic system intended to serve as a check on free market exploitation.
If there is any "purpose" to the patent law, it is to encourage invention
in the first place by providing some degree of insurance that an inventor
will have the first shot at profiting from the invention.
The prolonged fight between DeForest and Armstrong with respect to
radio technology should provide a valuable lesson.
The philosophical issue of fairness remains open. If party "A"
invents something which is later completely independently discovered
and developed by party "B," should B be denied the opportunity to
profit from his invention simply because A discovered it first?
The general gist of patents is to deter copying, so it clearly falls
short in such a case. B did not copy A, yet B may not be able
to profit merely because A was first to register his invention.
A free market mentality would say, let the market decide, but
that clearly isn't "fair" because it often simply depends on who
can undercut the other on price.
Thus the system can never be universally fair.
That's why lawyers get paid so much.
No human society has ever fully resolved the notion of how to fairly
reward human labor and inventiveness.
What if A invented an idea, but had a really crappy implementation,
but B independently (or not) implemented the same idea in a much
more efficient way?
The case of Teller vs. Ulam is another excellent example. Evidently
Ulam first came up with the notion of radiational coupling as the
way to create the hydrogen bomb, but Teller developed the concept
into a workable design. Thus, who should "own" this dubious piece
of intellectual property?
