"It takes a certain amount of time, material, and money to do that. With VC money, people are spending more money and want things done faster. Then, instead of building a house, you build a tent. At the same time, management is still selling a house. You never really get the house you envisioned."

• bountyquest has announced their first round of patent prior art challenger winners, and the standard take a closer look at one dealing with patents on downloadable music. cool to see that bountyquest might actually help bring some sanity to software patents.
• and, without the aid of bountyquest, a developer has provided prior art that should render obsolete many of altavista's patents on web spidering and searching.
• tim o'reilly lays it on the line, in The Rise of the Anti-Commons:

  [P]atents don't actually give you the right to do anything. They simply give you the right to stop others from doing it.
  
  ...Patent advocates would have us believe that they protect the rights of innovators. Realizing that the form of that protection is not a right to exercise the innovation in question but merely to keep others from exercising it, we may be more hesitant to go down that path. ...Do we end up in gridlock, a gridlock in which only the large players, who can afford the expense of patent cross-licensing, can continue to move?

• amusing patent blurb (nb: this link may go bad soon; inside.com doesn't appear to archive these items, for some reason) on a patent smucker's now owns on crimped sandwiches with no crusts.