&gt;  It would be nice to have a way to protect the &quot;little guy&quot; when they figured out a break through, showed it to the &quot;big guy&quot; and was then ripped off.<p>It was the &quot;big guys&quot; that lobbied for increased IP protections in the 1990&#x27;s, for a pretty good reason: protection from foreign competitors. I worked with a big router company once, who told me that a Chinese company had ripped off their router designs down to the English silk-screened assembly instructions on the PCBs. All of the little-company versus big-company stuff is small potatoes compared to that overarching concern.<p>That&#x27;s why a lot of big technology companies are still strong supporters of patents. They don&#x27;t want Chinese companies copying their chips down to bugs in the firmware and undercutting them on the market because they don&#x27;t have any need to recoup R&amp;D costs.