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by car_analogy
1537 days ago
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If they "took his code", that's a copyright issue, and patents aren't necessary to prevent it. Regardless, "e-mail, but on mobile internet" is not something that should be patentable, and even if this one case were justified, the overall effect of software patents is negative, and consists mostly of incidents such as Microsoft only supporting filesystems they have patents on, and extorting with them any device manufacturer that wants to interoperate with Windows [1], or patent trolls threatening small businesses for connecting their printer to the internet. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExFAT#Legal_status |
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It does fosters innovation, but it doesn't offset the cost it causes to innovation. It is very likely the common defense of patents suffers from the broken window fallacy.
The main purpose it seems to serve nowadays is to make it easier for certain classes of corporations to gain funding. And that is really it.