Top 86 Patents Quotes & Sayings

In an industry with highly sequential innovation, it may be better for society to scrap patents altogether than try to tighten them.

It's not healthy for patents to be used to stop other people from doing business.

The days are over when technology can be advanced in laboratories by individual scientists alone. Now you need an army of lawyers to negotiate the hazardous terrain of interlocking patents. Unless we find a solution to the problem of interlocking patents, the patent system may actually impede the very innovation it was designed to encourage.

I would just love to create a bunch of patents, I have a book of 50 right now.

Marconi is a good fellow. Let him continue. He is using seventeen of my patents.

Patents are being used to wage war in the digital world, and as a result, patents have become a toll gate on the road of innovation.

If the government objects to monopoly prices for new inventions, it should stop granting patents.

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.

Software patents are dangerous to software developers because they impose monopolies on software ideas.

The software patent problem is not limited to Mono. Software patents affect everyone writing software today.

Everything that can be associated to ideas, inventions, copyrights, and patents is part of the IP world - at least, that's my definition. That all starts with people. Education is key.

For us, not cooperating in the monopoly regimes of intellectual property rights and patents and biodiversity - saying "no" to patents on life, and developing intellectual ideas of resistance - is very much a continuation of Gandhian satyagraha. It is, for me, keeping life free in its diversity.

I decry the current tendency to seek patents on algorithms. There are better ways to earn a living than to prevent other people from making use of one's contributions to computer science.

It's very hard for individual inventors to get paid. For the same reason that private equity is valuable - broadly, that's a good thing - in the case of patents, many that own them aren't in a good position to take the next step.

While I support granting drug companies patents to recover their investment and encourage innovation, companies that take advantage of this goodwill to build a monopoly must be stopped.

We have more patents on pigmented inks than anybody else.

Sure, President Bush can say that the U.S. government won't fund stem cell research, but believe me, Japan is applauding. Because they will just do it first and get all the patents.

In the early days of the software industry, people cared about copyright and didn't give a damn about patents - they copied each other willy-nilly.

You know, in China, they say, come on over, we'll build the plant for you. Of course, then they steal your patents, but the reality is that they are aggressively trying to take our jobs. Every other country is. They know that to have a middle class, you have to make things.

There are no patents in finance.

Patents have long served as a fundamental cog in the American machine, cherished in our national soul.

The quality of American patents has been deteriorating for years; they are increasingly issued for products and processes that are not truly innovative - things like the queuing system for Netflix, which was patented in 2003. Yes, it makes renting movies a snap, but was it really a breakthrough deserving patent protection?

Patents are like fertilizer. Applied wisely and sparingly, they can increase growth. But if you apply too many chemicals, or make patents too strong, then you can leach the land, making growth more difficult.

People equate patents with secrecy, that secrecy is what patents were designed to overcome. That's why the formula for Coca-Cola was never patented. They kept it as a trade secret, and they've outlasted patent laws by 80 years or more.

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

Patents? Disappointed? Don't think of it that way. Software patents weren't feasible then so we chose not to risk $10,000.

Between 1980 and 2000 the number of patents registered in Israel was 7652 compared with 367 for all the Arab countries combined.

Patents are basically rights to try and develop a commercial product.

You should be innovating so fast that you're invalidating your prior patents.

No one told these American soldiers they might be shot down by bullets made by their own brothers here. No one told them that the ships on which they were going to cross might be torpedoed by submarines built with US patents.

There's no such thing as a legal right to break patents in the United States.

The issue for patents for new discovers has given a spring to invention beyond my conception.

There are certain zip codes that generate a disproportionate share of patents, of startups, of wealth, of jobs. And it's really important if other parts of the country are going to want to create these tech centers.

An e-bike is like headphones, you can say you have patents, but people will still copy.

Patents have a place in medical science - for new inventions that advance the state of knowledge.

As academics we have pretty good judgment about the quality of institutions that cannot simply be measured by counting the number of papers published or patents received. Outsiders who swoop in to count beans and make up lists based on statistics have little sense of what excellence is.

I had to learn everything about manufacturing, patents and how to run a business, and eventually I came up with an prototype that worked.

Some big pharmaceutical companies have engaged in dirty tricks to extend their patents, holding monopolies on certain drugs to pad their profits at consumers' expense.

Know your stuff. Have an angle. Know how to grow business, how to develop products, have patents and an undeveloped market that could be huge.

It's a phenomenon that started in the United States in which corporations make claims on the life forms, biodiversity and innovations of other cultures by applying for patents on them.

Everywhere in science the talk is of winners, patents, pressures, money, no money, the rat race, the lot; things that are so completely alien ... that I no longer know whether I can be classified as a modern scientist or as an example of a beast on the way to extinction.

At Mint, we developed five pending patents on our technology, ranging from categorization to the Ways to Save system that calculates how much a new financial product would save a user given their present financial situation.

China is stealing our intellectual property, our patents, our designs, our technology, hacking into our computers, counterfeiting our goods.

"Patents make our product defensible." The optimal number of times to use the P word in a presentation is one. Just once, say, "We have filed patents for what we are doing." Done. The second time you say it, venture capitalists begin to suspect that you are depending too much on patents for defensibility. The third time you say it, you are holding a sign above your head that says, "I am clueless."

Software patents, in particular, are very ripe for abuse. The whole system encourages big corporations getting thousands and thousands of patents. Individuals almost never get them.

Like patents - which also seek to protect the little guy - unions were started for all the right reasons. But like patents, they can be twisted into something that hurts innovation, competition, and ultimately consumers and the country as a whole.

If you're a large corporation, you can afford to pay the money to register patents, but if you're an individual like me, you can't.

Did you know that Kodak actually invented the digital camera that ultimately put it out of business? Kodak had the patents and a head start, but ignored all that.

With the rise of software patents, engineers coding new stuff - whether within a large software company or as kids writing smartphone apps - are exposed to a claim that somewhere a prior patent is being infringed.

People are getting patents on things that are too general.

'Product life' is measured in months, not years, and as soon as you introduce a 'product,' understand that others in your business are going to reverse engineer it to duplicate the results after they circumnavigate the patents, the trademarks, and the intellectual property.

The bulk of all patents are crap. Spending time reading them is stupid. It's up to the patent owner to do so, and to enforce them.

Making money from enforcing patents is no more wrong than investing in preferred stock.

An invention is something that was "impossible" up to then that's why governments grant patents.

If you patent a discovery which is unique, say a human gene or even just one particular function of a human gene, then you are actually creating a monopoly, and that's not the purpose of the world of patents.

I think software patents are a bad idea. Many patents are given for trivial inventions.

If you didn't have patents, no one would bother to spend money on research and development. But with patents, if someone has a good idea and a competitor can't copy it, then that competitor will have to think of their own way of doing it. So then, instead of just one innovator, you have two or three people trying to do something in a new way.

Large companies can afford to file patents on every idea they have. Small companies, we have to weigh our options, do the research. We have to decide where to place our bets. We can't just cover everything we do.

Technology people have as much interest in protecting patents as the entertainment industry.

The under-funded and over-extended United States Patent and Trademark Office does not have the resources to adequately evaluate the burgeoning number of applications, and too many low-quality patents are being issued as a result.