Top 100 Quotes About Patents
#1. Marijuana is rejected all over the world. Damned. In England heroin is alright for out-patents, but marijuana? They'll put your ass in jail. I wonder why that is? The only reason could be: To Serve the Devil - Pleasure! Pleasure, which is a dirty word in Christian culture.
Lenny Bruce
#2. There are certain zip codes that generate a disproportionate share of patents, of startups, of wealth, of jobs. And it's really important if other parts of the country are going to want to create these tech centers.
Juan Enriquez
#3. The under-funded and over-extended United States Patent and Trademark Office does not have the resources to adequately evaluate the burgeoning number of applications, and too many low-quality patents are being issued as a result.
Viet D. Dinh
#4. If you patent a discovery which is unique, say a human gene or even just one particular function of a human gene, then you are actually creating a monopoly, and that's not the purpose of the world of patents.
John Sulston
#5. Our patents' old age shocks us in the same manner that our children's growth to maturity does , but without the joy.
Azar Nafisi
#6. Whether you're a writer of stories or a writer of patents, you're an inventor.
Linda A. Tancs
#7. No one told these American soldiers they might be shot down by bullets made by their own brothers here. No one told them that the ships on which they were going to cross might be torpedoed by submarines built with US patents.
Smedley Butler
#8. Sure, President Bush can say that the U.S. government won't fund stem cell research, but believe me, Japan is applauding. Because they will just do it first and get all the patents.
Kevin J. Anderson
#9. Abraham Lincoln said, Patents Add Fuel to the Fire of Genius. What the great man did not say is that Too Much Fuel Can Burn the Genius
Kalyan C. Kankanala
#11. If the government objects to monopoly prices for new inventions, it should stop granting patents.
Ludwig Von Mises
#12. The history of patents includes a wealth of attempts to reward friends of the government and restrict or control dangerous technologies.
James Boyle
#13. Marconi is a good fellow. Let him continue. He is using seventeen of my patents.
Nikola Tesla
#14. I decry the current tendency to seek patents on algorithms. There are better ways to earn a living than to prevent other people from making use of one's contributions to computer science.
Donald Knuth
#15. I didn't really want to patent it because, for one, I don't like software patents, and, two, if you patent it, you make it public. Even if you don't know someone's infringing, they will still be getting the benefit. Instead, we just chose to keep it a trade secret and not show it to anyone.
Jessica Livingston
#16. Patents Act, 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this
Grace Thompson
#17. We don't name God; God reveals His name to us. We don't have the right to exercise authority over God. God copyrights, He trademarks, He patents His name.
Mark Driscoll
#18. I've just been told that Nestle has taken out patents on the making of pullao. (Pullao is the way we make our rice in India, with either vegetables or meat or whatever.) Before you know it, every common use of plants will be patented by a Western corporation.
Vandana Shiva
#19. People are getting patents on things that are too general.
Jerry Yang
#21. You should be innovating so fast that you're invalidating your prior patents
Elon Musk
#22. Patents? Disappointed? Don't think of it that way. Software patents weren't feasible then so we chose not to risk $10,000.
Bob Frankston
#23. As academics we have pretty good judgment about the quality of institutions that cannot simply be measured by counting the number of papers published or patents received. Outsiders who swoop in to count beans and make up lists based on statistics have little sense of what excellence is.
Henry Rosovsky
#24. But patents are not market devices. They are the opposite. They are a government-sanctioned monopoly permitting exclusive sales of a product for a limited period of time, protected by courts of law.
Linsey McGoey
#25. Like patents - which also seek to protect the little guy - unions were started for all the right reasons. But like patents, they can be twisted into something that hurts innovation, competition, and ultimately consumers and the country as a whole.
Sarah Lacy
#26. In the early days of the software industry, people cared about copyright and didn't give a damn about patents - they copied each other willy-nilly.
Nathan Myhrvold
#27. The software patent problem is not limited to Mono. Software patents affect everyone writing software today.
Miguel De Icaza
#29. Software patents are dangerous to software developers because they impose monopolies on software ideas.
Richard Stallman
#30. It's very hard for individual inventors to get paid. For the same reason that private equity is valuable - broadly, that's a good thing - in the case of patents, many that own them aren't in a good position to take the next step.
Nathan Myhrvold
#31. I had to learn everything about manufacturing, patents and how to run a business, and eventually I came up with an prototype that worked.
Melissa George
#33. Our strategy in dealing with patents in Mono is the same strategy that any other software developer would take. In the event of a patent claim, we will try to find prior art to the claim of the patent.
Miguel De Icaza
#34. The bulk of all patents are crap. Spending time reading them is stupid. It's up to the patent owner to do so, and to enforce them.
Linus Torvalds
#35. An invention is something that was "impossible" up to then that's why governments grant patents.
Robert A. Heinlein
#36. Fighting patents one by one will never eliminate the danger of software patents, any more than swatting mosquitoes will eliminate malaria.
Richard Stallman
#37. We have more patents on pigmented inks than anybody else.
Antonio Perez
#38. IBM isn't investing billions of dollars every year into research and development - and winning more patents than our top 10 competitors combined for more than a decade - as an academic exercise. But research is now being driven much more by what people need rather than just by what is possible.
Samuel J. Palmisano
#39. The issue for patents for new discovers has given a spring to invention beyond my conception.
Thomas Jefferson
#40. If you're a large corporation, you can afford to pay the money to register patents, but if you're an individual like me, you can't.
Larry Wall
#41. We took nothing from anybody. We gave a great deal to the world. The only thing keeping us alive is our brilliance. The only thing that keeps our brilliance alive is our patents.
Edwin Land
#42. Between 1980 and 2000 the number of patents registered in Israel was 7652 compared with 367 for all the Arab countries combined. In 2008 alone is really inventors applied to register 9591 new patents. The equivalent figure for Iran was 50 and for all majority Muslim countries in the world with 5657.
Niall Ferguson
#43. Between 2008 and 2010, at least 261 patents were filed related to growing "climate-ready" crops - seeds supposedly able to withstand extreme weather conditions; of these patents close to 80 percent were controlled by six agribusiness giants, including Monsanto and Syngenta.
Naomi Klein
#44. It's not healthy for patents to be used to stop other people from doing business.
Jerry Yang
#46. Patents are being used to wage war in the digital world, and as a result, patents have become a toll gate on the road of innovation.
Charles Duhigg
#47. If people don't get paid for their inventions, that's not a good thing. In the case of many patents, there are people who aren't in a position to take them to the next level. If you don't enforce your rights, no one is going to enforce them for you.
Nathan Myhrvold
#48. For us, not cooperating in the monopoly regimes of intellectual property rights and patents and biodiversity - saying "no" to patents on life, and developing intellectual ideas of resistance - is very much a continuation of Gandhian satyagraha. It is, for me, keeping life free in its diversity.
Vandana Shiva
#49. Everywhere in science the talk is of winners, patents, pressures, money, no money, the rat race, the lot; things that are so completely alien ... that I no longer know whether I can be classified as a modern scientist or as an example of a beast on the way to extinction.
June Goodfield
#50. Mark the spirit of invention everywhere, thy rapid patents, Thy continual workshops, foundries, risen or rising, See, from their chimneys how the tall flame-fires stream.
Walt Whitman
#51. At Mint, we developed five pending patents on our technology, ranging from categorization to the Ways to Save system that calculates how much a new financial product would save a user given their present financial situation.
Aaron Patzer
#52. Software patents, in particular, are very ripe for abuse. The whole system encourages big corporations getting thousands and thousands of patents. Individuals almost never get them.
Linus Torvalds
#53. With the rise of software patents, engineers coding new stuff - whether within a large software company or as kids writing smartphone apps - are exposed to a claim that somewhere a prior patent is being infringed.
Jonathan Zittrain
#54. There is nothing called as cheap patents. Anything cheap is not worthwhile.
Kalyan C. Kankanala
#55. Patents do not promote progress of science and technology, Inventors do.
Kalyan C. Kankanala
#56. You know, in China, they say, come on over, we'll build the plant for you. Of course, then they steal your patents, but the reality is that they are aggressively trying to take our jobs. Every other country is. They know that to have a middle class, you have to make things.
Debbie Stabenow
#57. Patents are basically rights to try and develop a commercial product.
Craig Venter
#58. Know your stuff. Have an angle. Know how to grow business, how to develop products, have patents and an undeveloped market that could be huge.
Mark Cuban
#59. It's a phenomenon that started in the United States in which corporations make claims on the life forms, biodiversity and innovations of other cultures by applying for patents on them.
Vandana Shiva
#61. However, the big German chemical cartels, I. G. Farben in particular, had harbored their patents; had, in fact, created a world monopoly in plastics, especially in the development of the polyesters. By
Philip K. Dick
#62. If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today's ideas were invented, and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today.
Bill Gates
#63. Making money from enforcing patents is no more wrong than investing in preferred stock.
Nathan Myhrvold
#64. If you look at the world's top 50 drugs being sold today, they are being marketed and sold by companies that did not invent them. I respect patents. I'll pay a royalty. But I shouldn't be denied the right to produce drugs for poor people at reasonable prices.
Yusuf Hamied
#65. In an industry with highly sequential innovation, it may be better for society to scrap patents altogether than try to tighten them.
Eric Maskin
#66. Did you know that Kodak actually invented the digital camera that ultimately put it out of business? Kodak had the patents and a head start, but ignored all that.
Peter Diamandis
#67. I think software patents are a bad idea. Many patents are given for trivial inventions.
Larry Wall
#69. Patents have long served as a fundamental cog in the American machine, cherished in our national soul.
James Gleick
#70. Each year, the United States issues about 70,000 patents, only a few of which ultimately reach the stage of commercial production.
Jared Diamond
#71. People equate patents with secrecy, that secrecy is what patents were designed to overcome. That's why the formula for Coca-Cola was never patented. They kept it as a trade secret, and they've outlasted patent laws by 80 years or more.
Craig Venter
#72. Patents are like fertilizer. Applied wisely and sparingly, they can increase growth. But if you apply too many chemicals, or make patents too strong, then you can leach the land, making growth more difficult.
Alex Tabarrok
#73. Beauty, however, must here be understood in its original meaning: as the glow of the true and the good irradiating from every ordered state of being, and not in the patent significance of immediate sensual appeal.
Josef Pieper
#74. And the reason is that until Wonder came along and figured out how to spread the idea of sliced bread, no one wanted it. That the success of sliced bread is not always about what the patent is like or what the factory is like, it's about can you get your idea to spread or not?
Seth Godin
#75. I wish I could put a patent on that thing. That was so straight I had to lean over sideways to see the flag!
Gary Player
#76. If I could patent 'being real', I think I could own that.
Tupac Shakur
#77. If you want to wear nude, go with suede or a beautiful leather, please, if I see one more nude patent stiletto on the carpet I feel like I'm going to kill somebody.
Jaime King
#78. With a few honorable exceptions the press of the United States is at the beck and call of the patent medicines. Not only do the newspapers modify news possibly affecting these interests, but they sometimes become their agents.
Samuel Hopkins Adams
#80. Holding a patent doesn't mean you are inventive, and not holding a patent doesn't mean you are not.
Kalyan C. Kankanala
#81. An unproductive truth is none. But there are products which cannot be weighed even in patent scales, nor brought to market.
John Sterling
#82. My aim is: to teach you to pass from a piece of disguised nonsense to something that is patent nonsense.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#83. I have a hunch that the unknown sequences of DNA will decode into copyright notices and patent protections.
Donald Knuth
#84. We have no patent on anything we do and anything we do can be copied by anyone else. But you can't copy the heart and the soul and the conscience of the company.
Howard Schultz
#88. I make more mistakes than anyone else I know, and sooner or later, I patent most of them.
Thomas A. Edison
#89. When hot dogs like Mr. D'Amato or the Republican apologist Roger Ailes say that Whitewater is worse than Watergate, it's because they're suffering from a disease. It's called bull-imia, and it's the regurgitation of patent hyperbole.
Anna Quindlen
#90. Biopiracy (is) biological theft; illegal collection of indigenous plants by corporations who patent them for their own use.
Vandana Shiva
#92. There is a patent office at the seat of government of the universe, whose managers are as much interested in the dispersion of seeds as anybody at Washington can be, and their operations are infinitely more extensive and regular.
Henry David Thoreau
#93. Don't fight the patent, fight the infringement.
Drew Curtis
#94. Food is the very heart of freedom. How can people be free if they can't feed themselves without getting sued for patent violations?
Daniel Suarez
#95. All inventions are not patentable, and all patented subjects are not inventions.
Kalyan C. Kankanala
#96. A Patent is not a license to make money, it is a license to prevent others from making money.
Kalyan C. Kankanala
#97. While the proximate ground of discrimination may be of another kind, still the pervading principle and abiding test of good breeding is the requirement of a substantial and patent waste of time.
Thorstein Veblen
#98. To tell you the truth although it would put £500 in my pockets to specify my own patent rails, I cannot do so after the experience I have had.
George Stephenson
#99. Hope is a strange invention - A Patent of the Heart - In unremitting action Yet never wearing out
Emily Dickinson
#100. The 1850s proved to be the decade of the most prolific patent litigation in America's history. Lincoln himself was involved, as well as his most three prolific cabinet members: Chase, Seward and Stanton.
Darin Gibby
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