i think the idea of bill gates was to save money which goes in establishing a patent process. I can safely assume that for 1675 patents granted last year... bill gates had to spend something like 4 million dollars excluding the inhouse staff used for developing innovations and maintaining a database..... microsoft never thought that it will be sued these many times and has to pay these many dollars.... now bill gates thinks that its good to invest some 20 million dollars on developing IP rather than paying several hundred millions on being sued.... i guess author needs to do more background study before making such dubious and non-sense conclusions in the article...
