Z:gnu-www-ja-stallman-mec-india--2b0b4b-When you look at it, what you/en

When you look at it, what you see is that the relationship between patents and products varies between the fields. At one extreme you have pharmaceuticals where typically a whole chemical formula is patented. So if you come up with a new drug, then it's not patented by somebody else. At the other extreme is software where, when you write a new program, you are combining dozens or hundreds of ideas, and we can't expect them all to be new. Even an innovative program, which has a few new ideas, has to use lots and lots of old ideas too. And in between you find the other fields. Even in other fields, you can get patent deadlock.