I'm reading back and forth between crag's reply and mine looking for a straw man and can't find one. Enlighten me? He strongly implied (it seems clear to me, though maybe you thought he was saying something else?) that the status quo was not a problem because it had happened before. I replied that it was a problem, had happened, and gave an example. Simply inferring an argument is not making a straw man.
The current system enables Apple to be the largest company in the world, in other systems other companies end up winning. So you don't get to assume the same companies win win after significant patent reform.
PS: Plenty of large companies have overthrown governments and enabled atrocities on a massive scale. Sure, someone always wins but it's hard to point to a company as benign as Microsoft or Apple and assume something must be horribly broken. Honestly, after comparing the Apple ecosystem with Android Apple is far better for developers than the more 'open' platform. Ditto for Microsoft, they had their time in the sun and 'hurt' their rivals, but compared to say standard Oil, US steel, or the East India Company there practically a charity.
