Z:gnu-www-ja-stallman-mec-india--79392d-Now the patent system is a lot/en

Now the patent system is a lot like a lottery, in that what happens with any given patent is largely random and most of them don't bring any benefits to their owners. But IBM is so big that these things average out over the scale of IBM. So you could take IBM as measuring what the average is like. What we see is &mdash; and this is a little bit subtle &mdash; the benefit to IBM of being able to make use of ideas that were patented by others is equal to the harm that the patent system would have done to IBM if there were no cross-licensing &mdash; if IBM really were prohibited from using all those ideas that were patented by others.