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And bad for everyone without them. It would be good to see Google putting some serious coin towards software patent reform. I'm sure that it would cost them less over the long term to get software patents abolished than to build up an expensive / extensive patent portfolio.

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Well, Google is a business and I'm sure that their decision to stockpile patents is a business one. I doubt that Google can reform the law by itself - it will be against every major software-producing entity.

Not to mention going against the "USPTO cash cow" in which the U.S. government has a vested interest: http://www.osnews.com/story/24987/Microsoft_s_Android_Shaked...

I got the impression from last week's This American Life that a lot of large tech companies are buying defensive arsenals of patents. And that Google lost out on the Nortel patents because a group of other companies (including Microsoft and Apple) paid even more for them.

It seems that there are a lot of companies that would benefit from incremental but substantive patent reform, and lobbying for it could be cheaper than the billions wasted on patent defense now.

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