Bangalore: If you tried to list the adjectives for appliances available today, you might find yourself singing the lyrics of a Daft punk song: harder, better, faster, stronger…and with newer ideas stemming from simplicity and ingenious ideas, most tech giants are suing each other over the right to their intellectual property.

However, what most people fail to see is that in the cross-fire, it’s not the patrons who get life-threatening injuries. Instead, new companies that brim with new life and ideas are the ones that get snuffed out of existence, before even having a chance.

So, for example, while Google buys patents from IBM to defend itself against Apple suing companies that used Google’s Android system, Samsung is denied sale of its tablets in Europe because Apple blocked the move by filing patents, hence require Samsung to obtain permission to do so. Microsoft, in the meanwhile, sneaks in and collects royalties from phone companies that use the Android system.

In all of this noise, smaller companies are either forced to:

1. sell their ideas to the large companies
2. sue the tech giants till they become flat broke because sometimes larger corporations tend to steal their ideas
3. think up revolutionary ideas that should-

•  not have already been patented, or come close to ideas that have already been patented by other companies , OR
•  block the conglomerates path of progress by filing a patent that all should be able to use (hence becoming a conglomerate in itself)

The only people who profit by all of these are lawyers, who argue cases for the big fry. 

One begs to ask the question: if every idea ever thought had to be patented, where would the world be? Or should the question be “Where are we going?”