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...The solution is patenting as much as we can. A future startup 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.
See the 2005 version of the comment :).
Good thinking. Those whom the Gods wish to destroy They first make mad. — Euripides
...There are some new modern-day sort of communists who want to get rid of the incentive for musicians and moviemakers and software makers under various guises. They don't think that those incentives should exist... I'd be the first to say that the patent system can always be tuned...the United States has led...because we've had the best intellectual-property system.
There's a reason why european SME organisation CEA-PME is against software patents:
CEAPME (Confederation Europeenne des Associations des Petites et Moyennes Entreprises, European Union of Associations of Small and Medium Enterprises) assembles SME associations from EU member states, totalling a number of 500,000 SME members on its own and 1,600,000 together with two regular partner organisations. FFII is also an associate member of CEAPME. [...]
Ignored by the commission of course. European SME are not the general interest, USA mega-corpos are!
