the fact that they get to extend them, even moreso
the 3d printing and open source community shows just how much of a farce it all is, since you can reverse engineer and use things for yourself but you can't sell them and development of niche things just explodes as long as no one makes money from it
they almost make sense for like, workshop and hackerspace scale business, and lab scale, but once you're the size of like oracle in 2008 your patents should just enter the public domain because clearly you don't need the head start
