Ok I might not understand all the ins and outs of patents, but what I do understand is that patents are becoming more of a money making scheme then actually intellectual property. Why in this day do we have companies suing each other for millions of dollars for some intellectual patents that they never produced into real products. These companies you would think were small underfunded companies, but the fact is they are large and powerful and had plenty of chances to produce these products but failed to do so.

Case in point Verizon and Sprint/Nextel VS. Vonage. Vonage just lost a $58 million lawsuit to Verizon recently and has another case winding through the courts with Sprint/Nextel. As far as I know these lawsuits were because of violations of patents that these companies held. Vonage’s only mistake was to take advantage of the cheaper cost effective advanced technologies such as VO-IP. Apparently these two large telecommunications companies hold patents on VO-IP, but failed to take advantage of it.

Why you say? Well because corporate America is a hungry lazy entity that feeds off the small guy. Growing companies like Vonage which are helping are country grow technologically are being forced down due to some one’s idea which never came to fruition. I wholly understand that if you patent an idea and then produce that idea and make it available to the public to generate income that someone using that same idea should not be able to generate income as well. But if you are too lazy to take that idea and turn it into a product or too greedy to produce that product because old technologies make you more money then you should have no right to your patent. The famous saying applies to this situation “the early bird gets the worm.”

So I believe patent laws should be reformed in order to let the small guy or the early bird be protected against the larger lazy companies and their bully tactics. If competition is what corporate America is all about, then I say the more the merrier, it gives the people choice, and with more choice the better it is for the people. With more competition we would technologically advance as a country. Corporate America would compete actively against each other trying more and more to beat the competition with newer better technologies. But as it stands now, we are laggards, and these patents are one of the chains that are holding us back.

I am prepared to be flamed in the comments for what you readers will say about my lack of knowledge, but I still think I have a valid point.