[PS: this is my personal opinion and should not reflect in anyway the great company I work for.]

Quite often we hear the saying that a person is the product of their environment. We all know that everyone is unique and that this uniqueness boiled together with the events and experiences of a lifetime which make for truely unique individuals.

That being said, I often ponder these:

1) Are ideas our own? Truely and fully our own? They are influenced by eventhing around us. The same experiences that shape us and help mold our character are what help us form ideas. So, doesn't that mean that you share a little bit of the ownership of an idea with everyone and everything that caused you to develop it? Without them you likely would not have perceived it to begin with.

2) If you have an idea which can better the world around you, and you do not share it, are you steeling from those who helped you get to the point where you perceived it? If the great scientists of the past had not shared their ideas, where would our world be today?

I see patents as a form of theft against nature, against humanity. When a person claims sole ownership of, and imposes restrictions on an idea they are stating that they have not been influenced by the world in any way, they are deliberately making an attempt to subvert the natural progress of humanity by limiting the impact the idea can have on the next generation of thinkers who they themselves must be influenced by the world around them. This next generation is crippled in the sense that they have been physically restricted from venturing down a stream of thought which in some way expands of the original idea. They are in reality saying "Don't even think about it!" and meaning it in the truest sense.

I would never take a way the credit one deserves for the ideas they perceive, but it's simply dishonest to think they perceived them solely on their own. Thus any patent is a crime against humanity as it is solely designed to inhibit its use by others. Though perhaps not the goal of patents, their result is to deliberately impose further disabilities on humanity. We already have enough of those.