[reddytowns]

The problem is that other people will just create one or more patents which are around using your breakthrough algorithm in different contexts. The famous amazon one-click shopping patent as an example. The internet is the breakthrough, but because there's no patent on that, its easy to surround with patents that should be too obvious to be patents, but have legal teeth even so.

If you patent the core idea, the other patents become a lot less useful. (Not that I think Google is thinking this way. It's just a PR problem to them. When no one is looking, I bet they do whatever they can to get as much money/power as they can.)

[woodman]

It is a terrible situation, and putting out prior art certainly doesn't fix that - but the alternatives courses of action are worse (assuming purely defensive interests). I think you're right though, if the internet was somehow patented then we wouldn't have one-click shopping patents... or much of anything really - we'd likely be having this discussion over a Minitel service.