IBM isn't investing billions of dollars every year into research and development - and winning more patents than our top 10 competitors combined for more than a decade - as an academic exercise. But research is now being driven much more by what people need rather than just by what is possible.

Samuel J. Palmisano

At Mint, we developed five pending patents on our technology, ranging from categorization to the Ways to Save system that calculates how much a new financial product would save a user given their present financial situation.

Aaron Patzer

Patents have a place in medical science - for new inventions that advance the state of knowledge.

Adam Cohen

There's no such thing as a legal right to break patents in the United States.

Alex Azar

Patents are like fertilizer. Applied wisely and sparingly, they can increase growth. But if you apply too many chemicals, or make patents too strong, then you can leach the land, making growth more difficult.

Alex Tabarrok

We have more patents on pigmented inks than anybody else.

Antonio Perez

For a decade, makers of AIDS medicines had rejected the idea of lowering prices in poor countries for fear of eroding profits in rich ones. The position required a balancing act, because the companies had to deflect attacks on the global reach of their patents, which granted exclusive marketing rights for antiretroviral drugs.

Barton Gellman

Patents are being used to wage war in the digital world, and as a result, patents have become a toll gate on the road of innovation.

Charles Duhigg

People equate patents with secrecy, that secrecy is what patents were designed to overcome. That's why the formula for Coca-Cola was never patented. They kept it as a trade secret, and they've outlasted patent laws by 80 years or more.

Craig Venter

Patents are basically rights to try and develop a commercial product.

Craig Venter

You know, in China, they say, come on over, we'll build the plant for you. Of course, then they steal your patents, but the reality is that they are aggressively trying to take our jobs. Every other country is. They know that to have a middle class, you have to make things.

Debbie Stabenow

I decry the current tendency to seek patents on algorithms. There are better ways to earn a living than to prevent other people from making use of one's contributions to computer science.

Donald Knuth

In an industry with highly sequential innovation, it may be better for society to scrap patents altogether than try to tighten them.

Eric Maskin

If you didn't have patents, no one would bother to spend money on research and development. But with patents, if someone has a good idea and a competitor can't copy it, then that competitor will have to think of their own way of doing it. So then, instead of just one innovator, you have two or three people trying to do something in a new way.

James Dyson

Patents have long served as a fundamental cog in the American machine, cherished in our national soul.

James Gleick

Everything that can be associated to ideas, inventions, copyrights, and patents is part of the IP world - at least, that's my definition. That all starts with people. Education is key.

Jean-Philippe Courtois

It's not healthy for patents to be used to stop other people from doing business.

Jerry Yang

People are getting patents on things that are too general.

Jerry Yang

If you patent a discovery which is unique, say a human gene or even just one particular function of a human gene, then you are actually creating a monopoly, and that's not the purpose of the world of patents.

John Sulston

With the rise of software patents, engineers coding new stuff - whether within a large software company or as kids writing smartphone apps - are exposed to a claim that somewhere a prior patent is being infringed.

Jonathan Zittrain

Sure, President Bush can say that the U.S. government won't fund stem cell research, but believe me, Japan is applauding. Because they will just do it first and get all the patents.

Kevin J. Anderson