Imagination buys MIPS for $60M, 498 patents sold to consortium for $350M

Small developers aren't immune to such activity. To the extent they do business with large companies, they can always be dragged in as co-defendants. "Apple: Samsung stole our technology and gave it to LittleCo, who were are suing separately for tortious interference with a contract."

The point is that if there really are so many entities just trying to abuse the system, they don't need patents to do it.

Small developers are best protected by patents, which simplifies using the judicial system to enforce their rights. Otherwise they would have to use a more messy system of contracts, as rayiner describes.

But the spying/surveillance is what we see happening: Google for "six strikes" and see what you find. Google for "The Unbearable Lightness of Monitoring", let me know what you find.

We also have a lot of "spying" precedents in the USA. Google "CALEA", "DCS-3000", "DCS-6000". Once something becomes illegal, almost nothing will be spared to suppress it. The NSA is almost certainly snooping on almost every US citizen, with the aid of telecomm companies. Google for "Room 641A". They aren't even looking for specific crimes, they're just monitoring.

Google for "crypto wars" to see what the USA wanted to do. Read especially the specifics of Skipjack that you can find. Ask yourself why cryptography was so nearly suppressed.

I don't really think this is over-the-top: it's almost factual, very little separates us from a really tight "IP" control regime.

You can uniquely possess real property. That's actually what distinguishes "intellectual" from "real" property. The computer on which I type this is mine: I possess it solely. When I'm using it, nobody else can, there's simply no room o the keyboard. The same holds true for my other real property, my stove, my refridgerator, my toaster.

You can use my "intellectual property" at exactly the same time and pretty much in exactly the same way as I use it. The law about "IP" is not about property per se, it's about monopoly. Some government agrees to enforce your monopoly on some idea.

But MIPS doesn't sell the instruction set reference. They sell CPU cores. So you have a blueprint that shows you exactly how the CPU works. The hard part is coming up with this blueprint, including things like designing caches to minimize power or structuring execution units to improve timing characteristics. That takes lots of expensive engineer time, iteration, testing, etc. But once all that information is distilled into a blueprint, it's relatively easy to actually implement it. Copyright protects you from literal copying of the blueprint. It doesn't protect you from someone just looking at your blueprint and implementing it.

I used to work on military radios, and we spent millions of dollars and years developing our technology. The bulk of that investment was coming up with designs that worked well. We shipped customers reference code. Copyright kept the customer from copying the code itself, but didn't stop them from looking at how our code worked and writing their own version. But the code was the easy part--once you knew exactly what the code should do, it was a matter of 3-6 months of fairly straightforward coding to reproduce it without literally copying the code. It wasn't like say Windows where the hard part is literally reproducing all those 10 million lines of code.