> I don't think so. The spirit of the patent system is you submit your product to them in the form of a working model.
On what basis? The patent system protects inventions not products. Not all inventions are sellable products in themselves, and not all products are inventions.
How would you patent anything meaningful if you can only patent an entire product? It’s would be trivial to around just patents, just make a minor insignificant change to the design of the product, and bam, you’ve got something brand new and unprotected. Thus rendering the entire reason for getting a patent meaningless.
On what basis? The patent system protects inventions not products. Not all inventions are sellable products in themselves, and not all products are inventions.
How would you patent anything meaningful if you can only patent an entire product? It’s would be trivial to around just patents, just make a minor insignificant change to the design of the product, and bam, you’ve got something brand new and unprotected. Thus rendering the entire reason for getting a patent meaningless.