[randomdata]

Patents were supposed to protect the little guy from losing his large up-front research and development costs to the big established guys.

I always understood the purpose of patents was to provide incentive to bring trade secrets out into the documented open for the long-term benefit of society by having a great body of knowledge that anyone can use. So understanding of great inventions didn't disappear with the inventor. A short-term exclusivity on using the technology was the way to provide renumeration for being willing to share your discoveries with the public.

Rubber band scrolling is a cute, even useful, discovery, but it seems like it could be duplicated by just about anyone without any knowledge of what would otherwise be trade secrets. Is that worth documenting for future generations in this way given the high social costs of taking such documentation?

[TimGebhardt]

Hmm, my comments don't really reflect this, but I agree with you. I think the end result of a system like this would be that software patents would be next-to-nothing worthless and people just wouldn't bother, except perhaps in the cases of truly innovative works of software (I can't even think of any worth patenting right now...).

Would Apple really file their rubber-band scrolling patent at a value of $1bil, then pay some multiple of that per year when it's so easily avoided by their competitors? Probably not.

And if they do then more power to them. But it would put an upper bound of the amount of silly patents that a single large company could file and maintain (think IBM, MSFT, Apple, etc). Right now it costs a company hardly nothing to file all these and maintain them but they have a huge potential upside if your competitor steps on that patent landmine.