COPYCENSE

“If you were to accept patent production as a good proxy for innovative ability, you would quickly conclude that one of the software giants is a whole lot more creative than the others.

“Piling up patents, though, can have as much to do with business strategy as with inventing things. Nowhere is that more true than at software companies, which make products that weren’t even patentable in the U.S. until 1981, and which still have widely varying approaches to the task of managing their intellectual property.”

Stacey Higginbotham. How Open? That’s the Big Patent Question. News.com. Sept. 25, 2005.