From next week’s New Yorker: Patent Bending
All patents, of course, stifle competition. That’s why inventors like them. But business-method patents have an especially chilling effect, in that novel approaches to commerce can be ruled off-limits to others. What eBay was accused of copying was a concept, not a computer code. As James Boyle, a law professor at Duke, put it, “Under this logic, one could get a patent on the idea of fast food—not a different way to broil the burger but the idea of fast food itself.”