- first example: that&#x27;s because a patent shouldn&#x27;t simply expire if no royalty is paid for it. (As an aside: the clock should start ticking for the first time someone starts selling a product implementing it. And patent royalties should also be paid with mandatory delay of at least 3 years or something: so, for example, an entrepreneur can start a company that uses a patented technology, even if now he can&#x27;t afford to license it, and only have to start paying for it after he had some time to start making profit.)<p>- about AK: all his ideas were software related and quite broad. Also, I would guess the he recognizes that allowing &quot;broad software patents&quot; indiscriminately with the current laws would be a total disaster, so he&#x27;s mostly against software patents, obviously. But in a different legal context he&#x27;s probably think completely different.<p>I don&#x27;t know that much about patent laws, but the parts that I do know of seem <i>totally backwards</i> to me. Like nothing makes sense the way it is, you&#x27;d have to rewrite everything from scratch and retrain all the lawyers and judges. Probably because the laws were invented for easily-buildable physical inventions like the steam engine a 100 years ago. And they have no concepts that make sense for &quot;informational products&quot;.<p>You can&#x27;t look at the behavior of people in the past and say &quot;considering their behavior, such laws would not have benefited them&quot;. The simple fact that a law exists and is written in certain way can completely alter the behaviors of people because they know they <i>now</i> can take advantage of it, so they behave differently.<p>I am personally <i>against software patents</i> NOW, btw. In the current legal context they would be nonsensical an harmful. But change lots of the context around them and they could be a very good idea for the reasons I mentioned in the previous comment.<p><i>Probably the solution would be to invent a new concept of &quot;soft idea patent&quot; that has no relationship whatsoever with the concept of &quot;classic patent&quot; and for which none of the current patent laws apply. Then write from scratch the laws for these new &quot;entities&quot;. And  &quot;digital computer software patents&quot; would be just one of the subclasses of &quot;soft idea patents&quot;, each with their separate laws and regulations.</i>