I got the impression from last week's This American Life that a lot of large tech companies are buying defensive arsenals of patents. And that Google lost out o

I got the impression from last week's This American Life that a lot of large tech companies are buying defensive arsenals of patents. And that Google lost out on the Nortel patents because a group of other companies (including Microsoft and Apple) paid even more for them. It seems that there are a lot of companies that would benefit from incremental but substantive patent reform, and lobbying for it could be cheaper than the billions wasted on patent defense now.