In an ideal world people would respect intellectual property and pay the dues to the rightful inventors. Since that not the case we have Patents to protect them…
We know, all to well, that patent, while in principle are a good thing, they really are implemented in a antiquated way. It is hard enough to work on your ideas, then just to find out that someone has patented the binary system, so you cannot distribute your cool innovative software as binaries! That is how ridiculous the whole intellectual property protection laws have become. They have just become tools to hinder innovation more than abet it.
Among all the patents the one I dislike the most is Software patents. Amazon’s “One Click”, what was that about? Why does’t Google patent “AJAX” or the GeoCoder (no comments).
While the idea of Patents is good, the implementation and enforcement is just a business of making lawyers rich, which is energy spend doing counter productive things.
So we need to fix this system, which is an easy conclusion. The tough question is how?