Z:gnu-www-ja-stallman-mec-india--17f408-And this, by the way, is the f/en

And this, by the way, is the fallacy in the myth that the patent system &ldquo;protects&rdquo; the &ldquo;small inventor.&rdquo; Let me tell you this myth, it's the myth of the starving genius. It's somebody who has been working in isolation for years, and starving, and has a brilliant new idea for how to do something or other. And so, now, he's starting a company and he is afraid some big company like IBM will compete with him, and so he gets a patent and this patent is going to &ldquo;protect him.&rdquo;