“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.”

1980s, GNU Manifesto (1985)

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

OSCON 2002
Context: J. C. Watts is the only black member of the Republican Party in leadership. He's going to resign from Congress. He's been there seven and a half years. He's had enough. Nobody can believe it. Nobody in Washington can believe it.... In an interview two days ago, Watts said, Here's the problem with Washington: "If you are explaining, you are losing." If you are explaining, you're losing. It's a bumper sticker culture. People have to get it like that, and if they don't, if it takes three seconds to make them understand, you're off their radar screen. Three seconds to understand, or you lose. This is our problem. Six years after this battle began, we're still explaining. We're still explaining and we are losing. They frame this as a massive battle to stop theft, to protect property.... They extend copyrights perpetually. They don't get how that in itself is a form of theft. A theft of our common culture. We have failed in getting them to see what the issues here are and that's why we live in this place where a tradition speaks of freedom and their controls take it away.

On biopiracy, from the booklet " No Patents on Seeds: A Handbook For Activists https://books.google.co.in/books/about/No_Patents_on_Seeds_a_Handbook_for_Activ.html?id=F0mftgAACAAJ&redir_esc=y" (2005)

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

"Code + Law: An Interview with Lawrence Lessig" at O'Reilly P2P (29 January 2001)(29 January 2001)
Context: Our problem is that lawyers have taught us that there is only one kind of economic market for innovation out there and it is this kind of isolated inventor who comes up with an idea and then needs to be protected. That is a good picture of maybe what pharmaceutical industry does. It's a bad picture of what goes on, for example, in the context of software development, in particular. In the context of software development, where you have sequential and complementary developments, patents create an extraordinarily damaging influence on innovation and on the process of developing and bringing new ideas to market. So the particular mistake that lawyers have compounded is the unwillingness to discriminate among different kinds of innovation.
We really need to think quite pragmatically about whether intellectual property is helping or hurting, and if you can't show it's going to help, then there is no reason to issue this government-backed monopoly.

"The Singularity," The New Humanists: Science at the Edge (2003)

Cited to "Challenges and Strategy" (16 May 1991) via Fred Warshofsky (1994), The Patent Wars. This is a misreading of Warshofsky's text; the quotation is actually from League for Programming Freedom (1991), " Against Software Patents http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/articles/int-prop/lpf-against-software-patents.html." An example of the misattribution appears in Lawrence Lessig (2001), The future of ideas.
Misattributed

Source: 1920s, The Future of an Illusion (1927), Ch. 8