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

"How to fight software patents - singly and together", Newsforge (9 September 2004)
2000s

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Richard Stallman130

American software freedom activist, short story writer and … 1953

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“Sun is one of many US companies that file software patents regularly, the reason we file software patents regularly is the same reason that Americans buy guns. Americans buy guns, because Americans buy guns. American corporations file software patents because American corporations file software patents.”

Simon Phipps computer scientist

Keynote Speech at FOSDEM 2007: Liberating Java http://ftp.belnet.be/mirrors/FOSDEM/2007/FOSDEM2007-Liberating-Java.ogg

“Columbus was not the first one to discover America, only the first to patent it.”

Andrzej Majewski (1966) Polish writer and photographer

Nie Kolumb pierwszy odkrył Amerykę, ale pierwszy ją opatentował.
Aphorisms. Magnum in Parvo (2000)

“Software patents may be used as a form of outright coercion, providing protection against theft of ideas as a potentially high cost to future inventors.”

Nathaniel Borenstein (1957) American computer scientist

[Borenstein, Nathaniel S., Programming as if people mattered : friendly programs, software engineering, and other noble delusions, 1991, Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J., 9780691087528, 53, 4. print.]
Attributed

“Well, the people, I would say. There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?”

Jonas Salk (1914–1995) Inventor of polio vaccine

CBS Television interview, on See It Now (12 April 1955); quoted in Shots in the Dark : The Wayward Search for an AIDS Vaccine (2001) by Jon Cohen
Context: Edward R. Murrow: Who owns the patent on this vaccine?
Jonas Salk: Well, the people, I would say. There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?

“In our time the blasphemies are threadbare. Pessimism is now patently, as it always was essentially, more commonplace than piety.”

G. K. Chesterton book The Defendant

"Introduction"
The Defendant (1901)
Context: In our time the blasphemies are threadbare. Pessimism is now patently, as it always was essentially, more commonplace than piety. Profanity is now more than an affectation — it is a convention. The curse against God is Exercise I in the primer of minor poetry.

“How could such industries as software, semiconductors, and computers have been so innovative despite historically weak patent protection? We argue that if innovation is both sequential and complementary—as it certainly has been in those industries—competition can increase firms’ future profits thus offsetting short-term dissipation of rents. A simple model also shows that in such a dynamic industry, patent protection may reduce overall innovation and social welfare. The natural experiment that occurred when patent protection was extended to software in the 1980's provides a test of this model. Standard arguments would predict that R&D intensity and productivity should have increased among patenting firms.”

Eric Maskin (1950) American Nobel laureate in economics

Bessen, James, and Eric Maskin. " Sequential innovation, patents, and imitation http://ec.europa.eu/internal_market/indprop/docs/comp/replies/appendix1_en.pdf." The RAND Journal of Economics, 40.4 (2009): p. 611.

“Well, then, the moment there is a patent case one can see it before the case is opened, or called in the list. How can we see it? We can see it by a pile of books as high as this invariably… Now, what is the result of all this? Why that a man had better have his patent infringed, or have anything happen to him in this world, short of losing all his family by influenza, than have a dispute about a patent. His patent is swallowed up, and he is ruined. Whose fault is it? It is really not the fault of the law; it is the fault of the mode of conducting the law in a patent case. This is what causes all this mischief.”

William Brett, 1st Viscount Esher (1815–1899) British lawyer, judge and politician

Ungar, v. Sugg (1892) 9 RPC 113, at 116

“If we fail in our efforts to achieve harmonisation of patent law relating to computer-implemented inventions in the European Union, we may well be confronted with a renegotiation of the European Patent Convention. The process of renegotiating the European Patent Convention would not require any contribution from this Parliament.”

Frits Bolkestein (1933) Dutch politician

Speech to the European Parliament (23 September 2003)
2000s

“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.… The solution to this is patent exchanges with large companies and patenting as much as we can.”

Bill Gates (1955) American business magnate and philanthropist

" Challenges and Strategy http://web.archive.org/web/20010218085558/http://bralyn.net/etext/literature/bill.gates/challenges-strategy.txt" (16 May 1991). Note that this quotation has been paired with a misattributed quotation. <br class="br">1990s

“The patent system was established to encourage inventors to disclose the details of their inventions. Its purpose was to help society rather than to help inventors. At the time, the life span of 17 years for a patent was short compared with the rate of advance of the state of the art. Since patents are an issue only among manufacturers, for whom the cost and effort of a license agreement are small compared with setting up production, the patents often do not do much harm. They do not obstruct most individuals who use patented products.”

Richard Stallman (1953) American software freedom activist, short story writer and computer programmer, founder of the GNU project

1980s, GNU Manifesto (1985)

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

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Richard Stallman130

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