"Patent wars" and intellectual property

[ciaoant1]

Most of us have probably heard about one company suing another over pattens and intellectual property rights (for example, Kodak sued Apple and HTC over digital image patents, Motorola Sued Apple Over iPhone 4S and iCloud, and Intel bought RealNetworks' patents and video coding tech over the last month alone), but what does it all mean for us and why do patents inhibit progress, discovery and innovation?

Check out this great article on npr.org (it's a bit long, so i won't copy-paste it here):

When Patents Attack

[tech3149]

1. I didn't check out the article but I have some personal exposure to this

A close friend and co-worker had been working on a speaker design for about 12 years. Since he was a regular working stiff, the application went under the radar. It was for a full range single driver speaker system. The design and physics were so simple and beautiful it was inspiring. The patent went though first time round, the problem was all those parasites he latched on to to get the idea to market.
If he or I had the money to support this concept, we would be both swimming in gravy.

PS: caio: watch your spelling, I usually just gloss over posts with spelling errors. I don't think I'm alone, if you can't spell right or adhere to
language protocol, we aren't listening.