Further to last night's discussion of intellectual property and, more specifically, patent abuse, I found the following web page interesting...
http://lpf.ai.mit.edu/Patents/patents.html
The information is a few years old, but still relevant. One link I particularly enjoyed reading was this one...
http://lpf.ai.mit.edu/Links/prep.ai.mit.edu/supreme-court.patents
... which talks about a 1950 US Supreme Court opinion that was rather critical of the claimant's patent application and subsequent infringement claim. The judge's comments cite an earlier opinion, from 1882.
There was something comforting about seeing that abuse of the patent system is not a recent thing, and that when these frivolous cases are brought to the attention of judges who understand the constitution and its implications, sanity usually does prevail.
And in other news, I found this article from The Economist, on the economics of sharing, to be interesting too...
http://www.economist.com/finance/displayStory.cfm?story_id=3623762