SpaceX is a great example of the Google&#x2F;Facebook situation. When you sell a service, and not a product people can take apart and reverse-engineer, you&#x27;ve got built-in protection from copying.<p>Pervasive Internet and the move to putting logic on the server definitely outmodes many uses for patents, though. Take Siri. SRI invented the technology, spun off a company with the IP, which was purchased by Apple. I don&#x27;t think that transaction would&#x27;ve happened without patent protection. But today you have an alternative model. Instead of licensing voice recognition technology for integration into products, you can provide the algorithm as a service. Now, the source code stays safely on the server side where nobody can decompile it to figure out how it works.