This article briefly touches upon first to file. I think it's clear that the change to first to file will result in the greatest threat to open innovation we h

This article briefly touches upon first to file. I think it's clear that the change to first to file will result in the greatest threat to open innovation we have ever seen in our lives. Think about it -- suddenly you will have swarms of lawyers and executives at pharmaceutical companies paying visits to research labs, and you'll have people from large software companies forwarding ideas posted on open source developer mailing lists to their legal departments. It won't be safe to suggest ideas openly anymore. It won't be safe to talk about "what if" or "have you considered" or "someone should really." We are going to see a flood of really bad patents based on other people's ideas -- and that's exactly what our lawmakers have provided to their friends in large businesses. Things are about to get a lot worse. But you know, maybe that's what it's going to take -- maybe we have to suffer economically, suffer culturally, before we as a society realize we are building ourselves an intellectual prison for which there is no justification. Yes, I know that patents are a temporary thing, only lasting 18 years or so; but really, do you think people such as the guy cited in this article are going to say to themselves, "oh, you know, maybe I'll just return to coming up with innovative stuff in the voice recognition field in 18 years, after Nuance can't come after me anymore" -- do you really think that will happen? No, of course not. We're going to see a lot of brilliant people forced to abandon brilliant projects and ideas, and we'll never know what might have been, what could have been done. I don't think anyone is fighting this in a particularly constructive way -- the whole "abolish all patents" camp is going to get about as much of a serious audience as the "abolish the Fed" and "abolish the labor union" camps -- and perhaps that is exactly what our large-scale adversaries want. We need to be more incremental, more nuanced; that's what they've done, and that's why they are getting everything they want. You think sneaking first to file was something that happened over a chain of emails somewhere? No -- if anything, I bet there is a protracted, multi-decade fight among a lot of very persistent corporate attorneys and executives that has lead to this "win." In any case, I really hope people in our industry can stop the useless arguments of "end all patents!" for long enough to realize they should be rallying together to fight this simple yet very destructive change that is right over the horizon. You sure as hell won't hear/read my thoughts on future technologies once this first to file thing goes into effect; and I am sure that savvy legal counsels everywhere will be telling their star engineers and employees to remain similarly silent. This is not going to be fun.