"If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today's ideas were invented and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete s

"If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today's ideas were invented and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today"; "The solution is patenting as much as we can... a future startup with no patents of its own will be forced to pay whatever price the giants impose. That price might be high: Established companies have an interest in excluding future competitors" - Bill Gates, cited in https://youtu.be/uH4RskpUFiA?t=1069 https://youtu.be/uH4RskpUFiA?t=1069 I believe what formerly happened with Software patents is currently happening with platforms. Lawrence Lessig (if you haven't read his works, highly recommend) talks a lot about how copyright is used to restrict creativity / culture / innovation. In this talk [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uH4RskpUFiA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uH4RskpUFiA] he makes the case that: 1. Creativity and innovation always builds on the past 2. The past always tries to control the creativity that builds on it 3. Free societies enable the future by limiting the past 4. Ours is less, and less, a free society What's fascinating is Apple has gone a step above and beyond here to use their control over a platform to control the innovations built upon it. The end-state is that no one can do to Apple what Apple did to other players (leveraging free software--Unix--and open hardware Schemas to kick off their computing platform). This pattern is one we've seen with other players, and will result in more and more people "defensively" building out platforms (what I suspect Google is doing with Android and FB with Oculus; if Apple's monopoly is allowed to stand it's only reasonable that other companies will need competing personal-computing platforms as a bargaining chip).