The idea for chicken nugget seems to have re-emerged independently at McDonald's, after Executive Chef Rene Arend decided to chop up and batter fry some chicken breasts in the company's test kitchen. But when the chain approached a pair of food production companies to help them mass produce the treats, it's possible (though not absolutely confirmable) that they were using some of the techniques Baker pioneered. And since he never patented his process, the professor never saw a cent, even as McDonald's earned millions after introducing the McNugget nationally in 1983.

Here's what makes the story particularly interesting from an IP perspective: It's good fodder for an argument whether you're for strong patent laws or against them. Even though he had the resources of an Ivy League university behind him, Baker is the pretty much the prototypical small-time innovator whose work made money for everyone who touched it, except himself. It's the sort of nightmare scenario that the pro-patent lobby loves to trot out in response to the idea that we should loosen IP protections.

On the flip side, the entire McNugget origin story is also an illustration of the ways innovation can thrive in a world of weak patent rights. As an academic equally devoted to chicken and to science, Baker was happy to pursue his research without the promise of a payday, allowing his methods to feed a collective pool of industry knowledge. Meanwhile, ordinary market pressure forced McDonald's to go searching for an innovative poultry product. And while the company is notoriously aggressive about protecting its IP (it's even applied to patent sandwich making), it's safe to assume that a lack of patent protection wouldn't have kept them from bringing the McNugget to market,* lest one of its competitors have outwinged them on the chicken craze. If copycats were a concern, they could have hidden the details of their precise process, much the way KFC treats Colonel Sanders's original recipe as a closely guarded state secret.

Ultimately, though, the market was capable of providing incentives at every level without the promise of a government-granted monopoly on the right to fry up extruded meat.

Given a choice between making sure everyone reaps the maximum profit from their work, and ensuring that good ideas become useful, free public knowledge, I'd take the latter. Obviously, there are some products — pharmaceuticals being the classic example — where the R&D costs are so high, and the ease of copying so low, that nobody in their right mind would invest in their creation without some IP protection. But that's certainly not the case for every valuable product. You can taste the evidence for yourself.

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*Baker's Wikipedia page suggests that McDonald's did patent the McNugget in 1979, but the article unfortunately doesn't cite a source. The only independent confirmation I've found for that fact so far is this graduate thesis from Cal State University. Neither the McNugget nor its production process appears to show up in Google Patent Search. I've called McDonald's to verify the recipe is protected IP, and will update the story if I get a response. If it's not actually patented, though, I think that just goes to further prove my point.