“On any given day you can find thousands of words of reporting,
advocacy and debate over the role of patents in technology. One
side promotes the availability of patent protection as the source
of much innovation, while the other contends that they have exactly
the opposite effect, and many other vices besides.“There is, however, one inequity that patents help to perpetuate
that gets little attention. That inequity arises in the area of
standards, where the owners of patents can exercise significant
influence not only over the costs of implementing standards, but
over who can reap the greatest economic benefits from producing
standardized products at all…”