Patents and Innovation

Recently, at the place, where I work, there was a talk on patent process. In this age, companies
are trying hard to build a good patent portfolio. While we were discussing about patents, someone
remarked - encouraging Patent fosters innovation. Nothing can be farther from truth. In fact, FSF
and some like minded guys have exactly the opposite outlook. According to them patents kill
innovation !

So, do patents kill innovation or do they promote innovation ? If one looks at software(including
networking) industry, it is clear, that networking, particularly TCP/IP is one field, which has
truly revolutionized our lives. Other is the PC. Also one remarkable thing about these two
technologies, was the lack of patents filed around these technologies. Imagine what would have
happened, if TCP/IP would have been patented, and there weren't publicly and freely
available RFC's. And even if someone gets them, they have to pay a huge royalty to use TCP/IP.
That would have discouraged companies/institutions from using TCP/IP, and we wouldn't have the
phenomenon called the www.

Most of the technologies, that we use, gained widespread adoption, because they were good,
and more importantly they were much more open, then their counterparts. NFS is a good
example of this. Sun, put the protocol in public domain, and the result is that NFS gained so much
acceptance.

Patents might not be necessarily evil, but to say that they "foster innovation" is ridiculous, and
people, who say that, do not understand innovation.