A patent should be a mean of sharing useful inventions with the world and getting paid in return.<p>I'm curious about how many here have actually read a software patent (or some text derived directly from it) that was genuinely helpful in solving a problem. Specific examples would be interesting to hear.
If you read a patent, you or your company becomes liable for triple damages, since it is considered willful infringement. Since you can't know what patents you might already be accidentally "infringing", the sane policy is to avoid reading or learning about any patents. This is explicit policy at many technology companies.
When I was working in finance I used to read patents filed by exchanges so I could figure out how their matching algorithms worked, but never to find out how to solve a particular problem.