[jrockway]

> patents lodged just because particular engineers got there first

That is what patents are. They encourage you to actually get there by giving you a time-limited monopoly on the implementation. It is easy to say "a freshman CS student could have figured this out", but if they did, they could have had the patent instead and licensed it to Intel and Apple. Instead, Intel and Apple had to figure it out on their own.

[danpalmer]

That is what patents attempt to be. There are many reasons that make them less effective at this than their ideal.

In particular, costs are high, litigation to protect is expensive, and so your average student wouldn't be able to afford this. The fact that software is typically shipped virtually means that borders are practically non-existent, and wide patents are often needed, or a company needs to give up on defending their patent outside their primary market.

To patent an idea will probably be around $10-100k per market. To cover US, EU, and large Asian markets, you're looking at $500k-1m, and thats just to get the patent. Then you'll need to defend it, which can be hard to do against entities based in non-compliant countries such as China.

This all means that unless you're defending the very core of your entire business proposition, you probably need to be a >$100m before it's worth pursuing patents, and even for the core of your business you probably need to have several million in funding.

[varispeed]

I don't think a freshman CS student could afford to apply for a patent. This is only reserved for big companies or engineers backed up by wealth. You also often get things patented that nobody thought about patenting as they are that obvious. It's just a mechanism to gate keep and secure profits for big guys. I have a friend who has multiple patents and their investor only agreed to put money in their project if they patented it and shared all revenue. They were not actually interested in the product itself apart from likelihood the patents will bring money. The project is now dead, but patents stay blocking anyone from trying the same idea.

[japes98]

Actually, speaking from experience, you can do this yourself (or mostly yourself with some guidance from professionals). Nolo press has a book ("Patent it Yourself") on the topic.