&gt;The secret sauce in a baseband is definitely the sort of thing that&#x27;s in short supply. And it&#x27;s software.<p>I think some of the general attitude towards software patents has to do with CS&#x27;s very close historical relationship with the math department, with many of the old CS advancements and algorithms having been done by mathematicians or at least math majors (if you count people like Knuth and Hoare) and in math there&#x27;s always been a very strong culture of work-sharing as well as the general attitude that many discoveries were fated to have been made by someone (such as the contest to prove the theory of quadratic reciprocity), and there are many famous examples in history of different people independently discovering the same proof. It&#x27;s this latter belief that causes people to believe that patents have a &quot;chilling effect&quot;: when there are no more algorithms to be discovered, the only way to develop an effective product is to pay one of the first movers, also known as &quot;finders-keepers&quot;, also known as rent-seeking.<p>Patents are awesome when they discourage stealing work, but bad when they discourage independent reinvention. And it&#x27;s really the possibility for independent reinvention, not &quot;triviality&quot;, that makes software patents a problem. Unfortunately just because a problem isn&#x27;t simple doesn&#x27;t mean that two different people won&#x27;t find similar solutions independently. When someone gets a patent on the only effective way to do something, it can create a legal barrier that prevents some people from being able to do it at all, like using a Mac in the &#x27;90s with a decent mouse, or listening to music on an open-source device, or HTML5 &lt;video&gt;... who knows how much stuff hasn&#x27;t been made because of MPEG-LA?