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This is great but is the government willing to provide special protections for small start-ups that can't afford the high legal costs of a patent defense?

I admit I have a minimal understanding of patent laws but from my limited experience they don't seem to favor the little guy much. I was a designer and co-founder of a tech start-up that held a patent on receiving traffic information over wireless devices. Awesome, right? I couldn't give you the technical specifics but this was before dash-mounted GPS or smart phones – we were first in the US but we quickly learned that didn't really mean much. We new we had to sell because Google, Garmin, Tom Tom and others were looming on the horizon and we had ZERO money for legal fees. We never got what we felt we were worth but everyone else saw the writing on the wall.

Is this really how it how it works in our wonderful capitalist society – those with the most can take what they like? Because that sucks extra hard.

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