> Yesterday, there was a wall of Tesla patents in the lobby of our Palo Alto headquarters.
This is consistent with my view of how engineers in the traditional disciplines view patents.
> At Tesla, however, we felt compelled to create patents out of concern that the big car companies would copy our technology and then use their massive manufacturing, sales and marketing power to overwhelm Tesla
This is the precise thing that patents are designed to prevent: to keep the market from turning into a race to see who can outsource most efficiently to China and inundate the public most completely with advertising.
> The unfortunate reality is the opposite: electric car programs (or programs for any vehicle that doesn’t burn hydrocarbons) at the major manufacturers are small to non-existent, constituting an average of far less than 1% of their total vehicle sales.
So the other manufacturers didn't copy Tesla's technology, either because they are incapable of it or because they didn't feel there was enough money in it relative to their traditional markets.
> We believe that Tesla, other companies making electric cars, and the world would all benefit from a common, rapidly-evolving technology platform.
In other words, it helps Tesla more to have lots of companies developing electric cars to push back on regulatory barriers and consumer perceptions than it does for them to protect themselves against larger manufacturers copying their technology. Also buried in here is the assumption that Tesla is, now, far enough ahead of its potential competitors that it doesn't matter if they copy the technology.
I think this is the right move for Tesla, but there's a lot of dynamics at play that have nothing to do with the usefulness of patents in general.