Patents
Create: "A future start-up with no patents of its own will be forced to pay whatever price the giants choose to impose. That price might be high: Established companies have an interest in excluding future competitors."
Bill Gates (1991)"If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today's ideas were invented and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today."
Bill Gates (1991)"The benefit even of limited monopolies is too doubtful to be opposed to their general suppression."
Thomas Jefferson, 3rd President of the USA"I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man."
Thomas Jefferson, 3rd President of the USA"Patents are being used as an offensive measure. [...] If you don't have any patents, you don't have any weapons in your armoury."
John MacPhail, Partner, Baker & McKenzie
(one of the world's largest law firm)"Patents are intelligent bombs."
Harvard Business Review"Reback often tells the story of how a team of IBM patent lawyers went to Sun Microsystems Inc. in the 1980s and claimed that the then start-up was infringing on seven of its patents. After Sun engineers explained why they were not infringing, the IBM lawyers responded that with 10,000 patents, they would be sure to find some infringement somewhere."
The Washington PostIntel's [chairman] Grove derides such patent holders for showing little interest in producing goods with their inventions in favor of demanding licensing fees from others. "We call them trolls," he said.
The Washington Post"The nature of software is that it is a writing, an expression of mathematical ideas. The copyright law protects this expression, and it does so without requiring costly and time-consuming proceedings."
Douglas Brotz, Principal Scientist, Adobe Systems (1994)"The government and the money-counters must not lock away from us, our intellectual processes -- not even when we execute them with the aid of symbols on paper, or performances on calculators, or programs in computers.">
Jim Warren, Board of Directors, Autodesk (1994)"It was simply that had the technology been proprietary, and in my total control, it would probably not have taken off. The decision to make the Web an open system was necessary for it to be universal. You can't propose that something be a universal space and, at the same time, keep control of it."
Tim Berners-Lee"Software patenting has run amok."
Tim Berners-Lee"Building up a patent portfolio by engaging in defensive patenting cannot always protect against hold-up."
Federal Trade Commission of the USA"More patents in more industries and with greater breadth are not always the best ways to maximize consumer welfare."
Federal Trade Commission of the USAlearn all about it: www.nosoftwarepatents.com