What is the mission of the US Patent Office?

 A recurring theme in my blogging is that people tend to have unexamined assumptions about what creates business success.  I know I have.  

With the right unconscious assumptions, Mills is easily rejected.  It is easy to believe that if Mills is correct, this would be easily determined by observation and once observed by credible people, word would spread and business success would be his.  What are the assumptions built into this belief structure that supports rejecting Mills?

Building the better mousetrap might result in a profitable business, but more likely, it will result in others copying it.  Patents were invented because the founders of the US wanted citizens to be able to claim the fruits of their own minds to have defensible economic value, if they met certain criteria.  The history of the development of patent law reveals that those criteria are not easily determined or fixed in time.  I am not a patent expert, although I did study for and take the patent bar exam (and failed it).  Yet, the value of a good legal system for protecting intellectual property was appreciated worldwide and our system was copied by many nations.  Eventually, even China, which had no concept of intellectual property, adopted a patenting system that bore resemblance to ours.  If innovation is not rewarded and protected, it is thwarted.  The Chinese government wanted to build an economic powerhouse, and they surely succeeded.

Societies that lack innovation stagnate, but they are stable.  This may explain why Marc Andreessen was reportedly told what he was told by Biden officials.  It appears that our society has reached a point where those who call the shots are aiming to shut down innovation, or at least curb it to only suit the needs of the ruling class.

It appears that the mission of the US Patent Office would quite different if Andreessen is correct, than what was originally intended.  Is there evidence to support the idea that the USPTO is no longer protecting innovation?  It appears that the short answer is YES.  The linked video illustrates the practice of patent trolling, which has existed for many decades.  In my view, it is something that could be eliminated with honest and competent patent examination, as well as the suggestions given at the end of that video.

You can label me a conspiracy theorist if you like.  That label has no significant meaning, except as pejorative.  I think that the case is well made that Mills is facing opposition that is difficult to discern as to motivation.  Why would anyone not want a solution to toxic and expensive fuels to drive a system that is devouring our environment?  Quality of life is directly a matter of the availability of cheap and clean energy.  Who would not want good quality of life?  The premises of these rhetorical questions is that nobody would want to risk the welfare of our progeny and beautiful planet, so everyone would support such radical improvements in our way of life.  I certainly want to live in a world where those premises are valid, wouldn't you?

But, what if those premises are not valid?  What if there is a tradition of maintaining stagnation in societies so that they will remain stable and the ruling class is not undermined by changes they do not control?  Andreessen was faced with people who told him that he needed to stop funding startup businesses, that the focus of the future would be on building only for control of the minds of the people.  There's a lot of evidence to support the reality of this dystopian future vision.  These are not ravings of madmen.  That book was written by a professor of communications studies and published by Oxford University Press.  It is the story of the development of the academic subject of communications studies, which was not based on the goal of understanding human communications, but determining how to use communications to control the masses.

It does not require much imagination to understand that if Mills succeeds in his goal of producing an inexpensive commercial device that produces very cheap and very clean energy, technology that would replace essentially all other sources of electric power, and would be intrinsically impossible to monopolize, this would be very destabilizing indeed for the powers that be.