As a holder of a number of patents (pending and granted), I'm obviously conflicted here. My early patents came from my days at Nokia Research Centre where there

As a holder of a number of patents (pending and granted), I'm obviously conflicted here. My early patents came from my days at Nokia Research Centre where there was a "patent quota". Yep, we had to come up with a set number of patents per year, regardless of the quality. My views on patents were (subsequently) very strongly influenced by this paper: "Against Intellectual Property" by Brian Martin: http://www.uow.edu.au/~bmartin/pubs/95psa.html http://www.uow.edu.au/~bmartin/pubs/95psa.html I would encourage anyone with an opinion on the topic to take a look at it. I'm not sure I agree 100% with everything in there, but the reasoning is very good. These days, I'm much more in the "abolish software patents" camp than I used to be. The only valid reason I can think to have one now is for "freedom to operate", but I can attest from bitter experience, that simply doing a defensive publication of the core idea is significantly cheaper than obtaining a patent on the pretext of freedom to operate. In any case, a system that necessitates spending upwards of US$100k to obtain freedom to operate, has something diabolically wrong with it.