The developer manufacturers file patent after patent not for the purpose of producing better developers, but rather as a means to deny their competitors from using the latest discovered chemicals and techniques. Most patents are competitor stoppers and never come to manufacture.
Rob, new developers don't grow on trees. Developer chemicals aren't "discovered", they're invented -- and they
aren't invented in academia, but in the research labs of Kodak, Ilford, etc. Are you proposing that the R&D findings of company A be made available to company B for commercial exploitation if company A decides not to use them immediately in a product?
And I'm not saying all science is worthless, but I would say that most science is only of worth to minority interest groups and that a lot of science is only of worth to scientists because thats what they are into.
That's true to some extent, but the problem is that it's really hard to determine the worth of scientific research, even if you're engaged in it yourself. Many life-saving drugs in use today are prepared on massive scales using chemistry invented 20-30 years ago that, at the time, seemed esoteric and worthy of your "that's what they are into" comment.
Oh yeah, and just how many people do you think would pay to take out a patent if the govt didn't "grant the patent holder some temporary economic advantage"? Do you think they really want to disseminate their intellectual property if they didn't have to? It's a legalised protection racket. You give us money and we'll protect you for 20 years or whatever the period is. Pure and simple.
The 20-year commercial protection comes in exchange for a description of how the invention is constructed and/or how it works. Otherwise, why would the government ask for such detailed documents and make them freely available to everyone to read? The description of the invention and how to reproduce it is the valuable part of the patent, for the government. If it turns out to be flawed (i.e. procedures in the patent don't give the stated result) the patent is invalid.
No-one has to reveal their intellectual property if they don't want to. If you don't file a patent, you don't have to reveal your procedures, and you instead have a trade secret. However, if someone figures out your secret, you get no patent protection.
Serious scientists publish their work for dissemination in scientific publications. They don't take out patents unless they intend to make money from it or want to stop others from using it. Wake up, the wording as you perceive it, makes it sound terribly nice but it is protectionism pure and simple.
It doesn't have to be either/or. A lot of academic research groups apply for patents these days, before publishing publishing their work in journals. If the work gets licensed, the academic department gets a revenue stream that can fund further research or other activities. I know of a few examples of this in major US research universities.
Academic and industrial R&D is
expensive. In my field of research (chemistry) top-flight academic research groups in the USA (20-30 grad students and post-docs, headed by a single professor) can easily consume $10M per year in research funding for materials, equipment, salaries, and overhead. Industry has an even bigger R&D cost because it takes a lot of time and work to make a product robust enough for mass manufacturing and sale. I don't know what it costs to bring a developer like HC-110 to market, but Kodak, Ilford, and Fuji will NOT do this kind of expensive R&D without some kind of promise that their intellectual property will not be co-opted by a third party before they've had a chance to make any money.
Whether the new developers patented and sold by Kodak and others are "better" than older ones, or more suitable for a particular photographer, is ultimately up to the customer (the photographer) to decide.
My $0.02.
