Patents quotes:

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  • I think software patents are a bad idea. Many patents are given for trivial inventions. -- Larry Wall
  • The software patent problem is not limited to Mono. Software patents affect everyone writing software today. -- Miguel de Icaza
  • Patents have long served as a fundamental cog in the American machine, cherished in our national soul. -- James Gleick
  • Patents? Disappointed? Don't think of it that way. Software patents weren't feasible then so we chose not to risk $10,000. -- Bob Frankston
  • Fighting patents one by one will never eliminate the danger of software patents, any more than swatting mosquitoes will eliminate malaria. -- Richard Stallman
  • Patents are being used to wage war in the digital world, and as a result, patents have become a toll gate on the road of innovation. -- Charles Duhigg
  • Patents are like fertilizer. Applied wisely and sparingly, they can increase growth. But if you apply too many chemicals, or make patents too strong, then you can leach the land, making growth more difficult. -- Alex Tabarrok
  • Our strategy in dealing with patents in Mono is the same strategy that any other software developer would take. In the event of a patent claim, we will try to find prior art to the claim of the patent. -- Miguel de Icaza
  • 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? -- Robert Pozen
  • If the government objects to monopoly prices for new inventions, it should stop granting patents. -- Ludwig von Mises
  • I make more mistakes than anyone else I know, and sooner or later, I patent most of them. -- Thomas A. Edison
  • My aim is: to teach you to pass from a piece of disguised nonsense to something that is patent nonsense. -- Ludwig Wittgenstein
  • This is the patent age of new inventions for killing bodies, and for saving souls. All propagated with the best intentions. -- Lord Byron
  • The US patent system adds the fuel of interest to the fire of genius in the discovery and production of new and useful things -- Abraham Lincoln
  • With their souls of patent leather, they come down the road. Hunched and nocturnal, where they breathe they impose, silence of dark rubber, and fear of fine sand. -- Federico Garcia Lorca
  • 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. -- Bill Gates
  • We have no patent on anything we do and anything we do can be copied by anyone else. But you can't copy the heart and the soul and the conscience of the company. -- Howard Schultz
  • A patent, or invention, is any assemblage of technologies or ideas that you can put together that nobody put together that way before. That's how the patent office defines it. That's an invention -- Dean Kamen
  • It is a most extraordinary thing, but I never read a patent medicine advertisement without being impelled to the conclusion that I am suffering from the particular disease therein dealt with in its most virulent form. -- Jerome K. Jerome
  • With a few honorable exceptions the press of the United States is at the beck and call of the patent medicines. Not only do the newspapers modify news possibly affecting these interests, but they sometimes become their agents. -- Samuel Hopkins Adams
  • Deprived of their newspapers or a novel, reading-addicts will fall back onto cookery books, on the literature which is wrapped around bottles of patent medicine, on those instructions for keeping the contents crisp which are printed on the outside of boxes of breakfast cereals. On anything. -- Aldous Huxley
  • Man must learn to rely upon himself. Reading bibles will not protect him from the blasts of winter, but houses, fires. and clothing will. To prevent famine, one plow is worth a million sermons, and even patent medicines will cure more diseases than all the prayers uttered since the beginning of the world. -- Robert Green Ingersoll
  • Consider the black widow spider. It's a timid little beastie, useful and, for my taste, the prettiest of the arachnids, with its shiny, patent-leather finish and its red hourglass trademark. But the poor thing has the fatal misfortune of possessing enormously too much power for its size. So everybody kills it on sight. -- Robert A. Heinlein
  • I was sitting in a chair in the patent office at Bern when all of a sudden a thought occurred to me: "If a person falls freely he will not feel his own weight." I was startled. This simple thought made a deep impression on me. It impelled me toward a theory of gravitation. -- Albert Einstein
  • If we did not have a patent system, it would be irresponsible, on the basis of our present knowledge of its economic consequences, to recommend instituting one. But since we have had a patent system for a long time, it would be irresponsible, on the basis of our present knowledge, to recommend abolishing it. -- Fritz Machlup
  • That reminds me to remark, in passing, that the very first official thing I did, in my administration-and it was on the first day of it, too-was to start a patent office; for I knew that a country without a patent office and good patent laws was just a crab, and couldn't travel any way but sideways or backways. -- Mark Twain
  • Tesla Motors was created to accelerate the advent of sustainable transport. If we clear a path to the creation of compelling electric vehicles, but then lay intellectual property landmines behind us to inhibit others, we are acting in a manner contrary to that goal. Tesla will not initiate patent lawsuits against anyone who, in good faith, wants to use our technology. -- Elon Musk
  • We have more patents on pigmented inks than anybody else. -- Antonio Perez
  • Software patents are dangerous to software developers because they impose monopolies on software ideas. -- Richard Stallman
  • Making money from enforcing patents is no more wrong than investing in preferred stock. -- Nathan Myhrvold
  • If you're a large corporation, you can afford to pay the money to register patents, but if you're an individual like me, you can't. -- Larry Wall
  • I had to learn everything about manufacturing, patents and how to run a business, and eventually I came up with an prototype that worked. -- Melissa George
  • In the early days of the software industry, people cared about copyright and didn't give a damn about patents - they copied each other willy-nilly. -- Nathan Myhrvold
  • 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. -- Linus Torvalds
  • Did you know that Kodak actually invented the digital camera that ultimately put it out of business? Kodak had the patents and a head start, but ignored all that. -- Peter Diamandis
  • 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. -- Donald Knuth
  • Sure, President Bush can say that the U.S. government won't fund stem cell research, but believe me, Japan is applauding. Because they will just do it first and get all the patents. -- Kevin J. Anderson
  • With the rise of software patents, engineers coding new stuff - whether within a large software company or as kids writing smartphone apps - are exposed to a claim that somewhere a prior patent is being infringed. -- Jonathan Zittrain
  • People equate patents with secrecy, that secrecy is what patents were designed to overcome. That's why the formula for Coca-Cola was never patented. They kept it as a trade secret, and they've outlasted patent laws by 80 years or more. -- Craig Venter
  • Like patents - which also seek to protect the little guy - unions were started for all the right reasons. But like patents, they can be twisted into something that hurts innovation, competition, and ultimately consumers and the country as a whole. -- Sarah Lacy
  • It's very hard for individual inventors to get paid. For the same reason that private equity is valuable - broadly, that's a good thing - in the case of patents, many that own them aren't in a good position to take the next step. -- Nathan Myhrvold
  • If you look at the world's top 50 drugs being sold today, they are being marketed and sold by companies that did not invent them. I respect patents. I'll pay a royalty. But I shouldn't be denied the right to produce drugs for poor people at reasonable prices. -- Yusuf Hamied
  • If people don't get paid for their inventions, that's not a good thing. In the case of many patents, there are people who aren't in a position to take them to the next level. If you don't enforce your rights, no one is going to enforce them for you. -- Nathan Myhrvold
  • IBM isn't investing billions of dollars every year into research and development - and winning more patents than our top 10 competitors combined for more than a decade - as an academic exercise. But research is now being driven much more by what people need rather than just by what is possible. -- Samuel J. Palmisano
  • If you didn't have patents, no one would bother to spend money on research and development. But with patents, if someone has a good idea and a competitor can't copy it, then that competitor will have to think of their own way of doing it. So then, instead of just one innovator, you have two or three people trying to do something in a new way. -- James Dyson
  • You should be innovating so fast that you're invalidating your prior patents -- Elon Musk
  • Marconi is a good fellow. Let him continue. He is using 17 of my patents. -- Nikola Tesla
  • It's not healthy for patents to be used to stop other people from doing business. -- Jerry Yang
  • An invention is something that was "impossible" up to then that's why governments grant patents. -- Robert A. Heinlein
  • The issue for patents for new discovers has given a spring to invention beyond my conception. -- Thomas Jefferson
  • I would just love to create a bunch of patents, I have a book of 50 right now. -- Kellan Lutz
  • Between 1980 and 2000 the number of patents registered in Israel was 7652 compared with 367 for all the Arab countries combined. -- Niall Ferguson
  • In an industry with highly sequential innovation, it may be better for society to scrap patents altogether than try to tighten them. -- Eric Maskin
  • Know your stuff. Have an angle. Know how to grow business, how to develop products, have patents and an undeveloped market that could be huge. -- Mark Cuban
  • The bulk of all patents are crap. Spending time reading them is stupid. It's up to the patent owner to do so, and to enforce them. -- Linus Torvalds
  • We don't name God; God reveals His name to us. We don't have the right to exercise authority over God. God copyrights, He trademarks, He patents His name. -- Mark Driscoll
  • It's a phenomenon that started in the United States in which corporations make claims on the life forms, biodiversity and innovations of other cultures by applying for patents on them. -- Vandana Shiva
  • We took nothing from anybody. We gave a great deal to the world. The only thing keeping us alive is our brilliance. The only thing that keeps our brilliance alive is our patents. -- Edwin Land
  • The under-funded and over-extended United States Patent and Trademark Office does not have the resources to adequately evaluate the burgeoning number of applications, and too many low-quality patents are being issued as a result. -- Viet D. Dinh
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