Now that's what I'm talking about!<p>Patents were originally intended to encourage investors in a time when bringing a product to market could take years.<p>In the software industry, that assumption is, to put it mildly, totally off. Therefore, in the software industry, granting someone a 17 year monopoly on an idea just encourages another, destructive type of strategy that hurts the entire industry: PATENT TROLLING.<p>Seriously, it is a legal strategy to describe something to the government, wait a few years and then go after the people who actually BUILT IT (even if they came up with it independently, as long as they can't prove they came up with it before you described it in a patent application).<p>That's BULL CRAP. You didn't do anything except write some paper. If you're good at it, you don't even need a lawyer. And you get to collect money from the hard work of others.<p>On the other hand, I feel that if you DID write a patent, AND you tried to make it work, AND you are succeeding, you SHOULD be able to prevent your competitors from just copying what you did. But not for 17 years. For two years at most!<p>It is in this latter sense that the patent system is great. I'd get a provisional patent over an NDA anyday. Because it's more legally enforceable. Say a company meets with me and I tell them the idea. First of all I don't have to require them to sign any NDA. Secondly, suppose they say, "nice idea, we are going to do it ourselves". I can tell them, "I have a provisional patent, and I will sue your ass in 2 years." Or I can tell them NOTHING, go ahead and convert it to a real patent (probably $5k out of my pocket) and go sue them 2 years later. Not 17 years later.<p>This, I don't mind. They wanted to screw me by stealing my idea, they got burned. This will encourage companies to NOT screw individual investors and actually decide if they want to wait 3 years before making this, or work with the inventor.<p>With NDAs, there is no way to prove anything. I spoke to Bobby, and they signed an NDA. Then, Charlie Inc. comes out with my product. I didn't make Charlie, Inc. sign anything, and Bobby doesn't have the $5 million dollars to pay me, and I can't prove he told anything to Charlie, Inc. OOPS.<p>That's what software patents should protect against. That's it. They currently do, but we don't need 17 years of that kind of protection!