You do realize that a patent is a deliberately created, temporary monopoly.
But then, the whole patent system has been fucked up for umpteen years because of the way lawyers lay out the legalese on most patents. Something as specific as a new protocol to transfer data (say, SPDY) can be massaged into being a vague generic definition ("a binary transmission method designed to make HTTP-like data structures and operations possible in a more efficient manner") that could cover a lot of ground, giving the owner of the patent the power to halt innovation (ZeroMQ could very well fall under the umbrella defined of such 'patent') while giving exactly 0 benefit to anyone.
I'm just waiting for someone cheeky enough to come up with a vague wording for describing a 'wooden and/or plastic object designed with the purpose of holding items and or facilitating common household tasks' (i.e. a piece of furniture) and sue IKEA.
Because it belongs to Stanford University, not Google.
I think there's a fine line where on one side inventors cant net a profit without a time-based monopoly but on the other side of this fine line it's just hurting competition.
Or was pagerank something they did early on and I'm mixing up two things.