Chris Dixon, an investor and a long-term entrepreneur: "a key part of the problem is that so many patents are clearly obvious to anyone skilled in the art." ... any competent engineer could create what's found in the vast majority of software patents ... the examiners simply aren't competent enough to recognize what's obvious.
Mike Masnick, founder and CEO of Floor64 and editor of the Techdirt blog: "few people in Silicon Valley actually think patents are a good idea any more. The system has become so distorted that most of the people they're supposed to benefit the most don't want them, but feel compelled to get them due to the system. What a massive amount of waste, leading to a mess that holds back innovation."
Fred Wilson, "The basic problem with patents is that you're trying to assign property rights to something that doesn't deserve property rights. The fact that these property rights end up in the hands of financial owners as opposed to the original inventors just exacerbates the problem. The basic problem is that [a] bunch of engineers can be sitting at [lunch] designing some amazing new feature and somebody unbeknownst to them has a patent on this feature and never actually implemented it and can now screw them over… It’s just not right, it shouldn’t exist." ... compares patenting software to patenting music, noting that neither makes sense.
An investor’s entire goal in life is separating an invention from the inventor and using that invention to separate customers from their money.
A patent gets in their way.