Patent Abuse Quotes

I decry the current tendency to seek patents on algorithms. There are better ways to earn a living than to prevent other people from making use of one's contributions to computer science.

Fighting patents one by one will never eliminate the danger of software patents, any more than swatting mosquitoes will eliminate malaria.

It's not healthy for patents to be used to stop other people from doing business.

One dirty tactic big pharmaceutical companies use is keeping drug prices artificially high through anti-competitive conduct, such as paying competitors millions of dollars to stop them from creating generic drugs.

I think software patents are a bad idea. Many patents are given for trivial inventions.

support … continued widespread innovation by resisting the wider application of patents

I have called this phenomenon of stealing common knowledge and indigenous science "biopiracy" and "intellectual piracy." According to patent systems we shouldn't be able to patent what exists as "prior art." But the United States patent system is somewhat perverted. First of all, it does not treat the prior art of other societies as "prior art." Therefore anyone from the United States can travel to another country, find out about the use of a medicinal plant, or find a seed that farmers use, come back here, claim it as an invention or an innovation.

In an industry with highly sequential innovation, it may be better for society to scrap patents altogether than try to tighten them.

Some big pharmaceutical companies have engaged in dirty tricks to extend their patents, holding monopolies on certain drugs to pad their profits at consumers' expense.

We believe that patents exist to reward the inventors of truly outstanding ideas, not to allow big businesses to stifle competition with an ever-growing tide of trivial, incomprehensible, overreaching patents. We will stop the abuse of patent law by raising the bar on how innovative an idea has to be before it can be patented, and by prohibiting patents on software, business methods, concepts and works of nature. We will require a working model to be provided to the patent office before a patent is granted and we will strictly enforce the current rule that patents are invalid if they are "obvious to someone skilled in the art".

I've just been told that Nestle has taken out patents on the making of pullao. (Pullao is the way we make our rice in India, with either vegetables or meat or whatever.) Before you know it, every common use of plants will be patented by a Western corporation.

People are getting patents on things that are too general.

patents are an arm in the hands of large enterprises which use them in order to block all inconvenient innovation or to restrict the development of free software. The American experience with software patents is particularly negative and merits reflexion

Software patents, in particular, are very ripe for abuse. The whole system encourages big corporations getting thousands and thousands of patents. Individuals almost never get them.

Anyone who puts a small gloss on a fundamental technology, calls it proprietary, and then tries to keep others from building on it, is a thief.

The quality of American patents has been deteriorating for years; they are increasingly issued for products and processes that are not truly innovative - things like the queuing system for Netflix, which was patented in 2003. Yes, it makes renting movies a snap, but was it really a breakthrough deserving patent protection?