Not really - it was wrong then/there and it's wrong here.
- Small company gets a patent, thinks it will protect them, and either never uses it or quickly learns that their one patent will not protect them from the thousands held by whoever they want protection from. They also don't have the time or money to waste on litigation rather than just building a product.
- Large company gets a patent, adds it to the war chest, uses it as a giant stick to force anyone working in the same general area to pay up. Small companies have to pay up, and Free and Open Source Software gets excluded entirely (or just publishes their code anyway and says "screw patents", which works nicely for people not worth suing but makes anyone else using their code a target).
- Patent trolls, who write or more commonly acquire patents, wave them around like a stick, and extort money from people actually being productive.
One of these cases derives no benefit from software patents, and the other two turn software patents into net losses for the public. So, tell me again how software patents represent a useful tradeoff for the general public, and why we should grant an artificial monopoly that would not otherwise exist?
This changed with computers. You could never start a car factory in a garage, but there was a golden age where you could start a high-tech electronics company like HP or Apple.
Today you can start a web-based or software company on a laptop in a coffee shop or library. This is a big deal, let's not kill it.
Software patents have to go away or we're going to be stuck in the industrial age, which would be bad because we've already sold off most of our factories.
Actually, it has. Large scale production may have usually been in a factory, but often that factory was small production multiplied. Ford and the like were anomalies, even in the car biz.
> You could never start a car factory in a garage
I don't know about you, but literally thousands of folks did exactly that.
See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_car_brands . Australia is sort of interesting as is Britain.
OK, that's probably 700+ manufacturers after duplicates are counted for. Which is great!
But I can't figure out how to tell how many of them meet my original criteria of manufacturing outside of "freestanding factories". Spot-checking the links from Wikipedia turns up several references to converted bicycle and motorcycle factories. No references to "two guys in a garage" which kinda makes sense considering garages probably came after the early automobiles. :-)
No doubt some of them started in barns, but again, I don't think that was a huge part of the economy.
The US wikipedia entry claims that very few car companies were started after 1930. I know a couple from the 60s that didn't make the list which were literally a couple of guys in a garage. No, they weren't casting their own engine blocks but neither does Lotus for some of their models.
> But I can't figure out how to tell how many of them meet my original criteria of manufacturing outside of "freestanding factories".
Most made very few cars so it's unlikely that they had significant factories.
> I don't think that was a huge part of the economy.
There were two separate claims. The first was that small scale manufacturing was a significant part of manufacturing. I haven't addressed that.
The second was that lots of car companies had almost nothing in the way of "factory". That's the claim that I've supported.