The &quot;tech industry&quot; is incredibly diverse to make such a broad generalization. I know for a fact that many players in, say, the telecommunications, chip design and semiconductor industries regularly read their competitors&#x27; patents. This helps them not only keep pace with the state of the art, it also helps gather competitive intelligence and guess at their competitors&#x27; future directions.<p>In software, sure, few people read patents. Primarily I&#x27;d say it&#x27;s because a) 99.9% of software development is producing infinite variations of simple CRUD apps, not solving hard problems that require looking up any sort of references, and b) NIH is a like a congenital defect in developers.