This American Life: When Patents Attack →
I don’t know of ANY programmers/geeks/bloggers/VCs (really anybody close to the entrepreneurship community) who likes the patent system as it stands. This is a great overview of “non-practicing entities” (patent trolls) and how the current patent system does not foster innovation, but instead stifles it. As a personal example, I am pretty scared of what could happen when I release my iPhone app if trolls like Lodsys get their way and win cases against small development shops like The Iconfactory.
