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Why does Coca Cola Company fail to protect their receipe with patents?
We shall remember that, at any time, choices of IP protection shall always rest on profitability. If the patent protection make people lose money, then people would choose to avoid that.
By patenting the receipe of coke, Coca Cola company have to DISCLOSE the receipe to the world. In return, the receipe MAY be protected for a max of 20 years. After the protecting period expires, Coca Cola receipe falls into public knowledge, and anyone may use it anywhere.
It is not so easy to crack the coke receipe. Why would Coca Cola disclose their receipe to exchange for a short protection?
Surely, if the receipe is disclosed accidentally, anyone in the world may begin to use this receipe, and numberous competitors appear. In order to minimize the harm brought by the possible competitors, Coca Cola has invested a lot of money on their Trademarks and Scale of Production.
Now Coca Cola have a famous brand. Even two coke products taste the same, you would still choose Coca Cola.
By holding huge scale of production, Coca Cola is able to produce coke at a very very low cost. Even when another company begin to produce the same coke, they can never make coke this cheap.
Even when it is profitable to patent your product, you may still see no “patent” directly linked to a particular “product model”. See iPhone. Thousand of patents may be linked to the product, and there is no patent to protect “iPhone X”. We may need such strategies to mislead competitors, max the protection range, …
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