A patent is meant to encourage people and companies to share the details of their inventions, instead of keeping them secret. In return the inventors get protection for a certain number of years.
The modern purposes of patents seem to have shifted a long way from that.
I wonder how much of ADSL's advantage is due to trade secrets (spread across many vendors) versus how much has been published as patents.
I'm not sure if that's true, or if it's more that 1) we hear more about the more egregious stuff and/or 2) something was lost in translation with that stated purpose when the world went digital.
Other aspects now matter: defensive patents, patent pools, patent trolls, patent portfolios, etc.
Triple damages made a farce of patents as dissemination of invention.