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Google's Six-Front War
wasimkadak writes "While the tech world is buzzing about the launch and implications of Google's new social network, Google+, it's worth noting that Google isn't just in a war with Facebook, it's at war with multiple companies across multiple industries. In fact, Google is fighting a multi-front war with a host of tech giants for control over some of the most valuable pieces of real estate in technology."
Patents were made to ensure that in exchange for making information public, the inventor would get temporary exclusivity. The purpose was to get information that would have been held as a trade secret, or in past ages by trade guilds, and potentially lost. Now, of course, patents are useless as they rarely describe HOW to make the item in question, and are instead a vague concept grab and used not to protect the inventor but as clubs to beat others down with.
Copyright is similar, though it was meant to give creators some incentive to create.
They don't claim property rights. They confuse the issue with the poor phrase "intellectual property" even though it isn't.
They do come with a cost. Eventually they will lose the exclusive privilege to the information. The problems lie around the laws that make up copyright and patents.