>> Yes patents are impacting the industry but that's not to say that competition about things users care about has stopped, it's just slowing things up a bit.

I think "slowing things up a bit" is a great understatement. Hackers who could build the Next Big Thing have no chance at success if it takes a billion-dollar patent arsenal to avoid getting sued out of existence.

Who wins this fight is a side issue. The real issue, I think, is that only such giants can compete. If so, we're missing out on a lot of innovation.

A lot of products can be dreamt of that do not benefit the Apple or Microsoft or Google ecosystems. But can they be built without infringing "a navigation tool for graphical user interface?"

And yet most people are somehow managing to avoid getting sued out of existence while still building amazing products in small companies and start ups.

You have a point and I was a bit polemic. Nonetheless those conflicts do reach the consumer in a significant manner, for example last year, when I updated my smartphone firmware for stability reasons, all the rubber band menus vanished and were replaced by glowing edges because of the ongoing dispute. And those patents weren't even applicable in my country. Also remember all the cases where one side was trying to prohibit the sale of some phone or tablet somewhere in the world.

I don't dispute that there is an impact but your example shows the real scale of it. Is rubber banding really such a great loss? Yes it's nice but what's the actual impact on the quality of your experience been?

Frankly most of the patents that have been enforced seem to me at least to have been pretty minor and relatively easy to workaround with little real impact on the user.

To take the counter-argument, do these things really need the protection of patents then? Wouldn't the situation be better for the user if minor innovations of this sort could be borrowed, and companies instead needed to continue innovating in order to differentiate their products?

I could see a short protection period for things like this, but the magnitude of current protections seems extreme.

I agree - my personal preference is for reform of the patent system to provide a higher bar for what can be patented (actively used by the owner in a current product, evidence of significant investment to get there, significantly non-obvious and so on) and a shorter period (three to five years except in exceptional circumstances).

But that's a somewhat different argument - the original point was that consumers were being significantly impacted and I don't think this shows that.

To my mind the biggest impact may be coming from FRAND patents, the terms of which don't have to be particularly fair or reasonable and as such can easily be used to block new entrants. To my mind FRAND patents should have transparent licensing terms which are common to every licensee whether you be a major multinational or a two man start up.

The amount spent on patents and related litigation is massive. There are other large costs as well of course, but the patent fiasco is a large drag on the industry.

Something I'd like to see in addition to the now-pending reform is a law limiting damages to a fraction of revenue related to how the patent figures in the device in question. That ends up looking like a mandatory licensing fee, which I think would be about right for those few tech patents which are actually valid.