> At least we're starting to see notable investors rally against them, like pg and Fred Wilson - the very people who should be benefiting the most from a non broken patent system.
John Carmack has been speaking out against patents for a long time, and you would think he should be the perfect example of the lone genius inventing amazing new technology that needs the patent system to make money from his inventions:
Helps that he's been directly hit by them: both Carmack and Creative Labs developed a similar shadow algorithm around the same time (depth fail[0] or "Carmack's Reverse"), but Creative got a patent and id had to license their tech because of it (and the Reverse had to be stripped out of the iT4 source release).
The story neatly illustrates how the patent system doesn't really benefit inventors and instead benefits well established corporations.
And Carmack was against patents before that even, and what is more, even after that he refused to patent any of his work, not even for "defensive" purposes, just out of principle.
John Carmack has been speaking out against patents for a long time, and you would think he should be the perfect example of the lone genius inventing amazing new technology that needs the patent system to make money from his inventions:
http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/patents/carmack