A future startup with no patents of its own will be forced to pay whatever price the giants choose to impose. That price might be high. Established companies have an interest in excluding future competitors.
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Cited to "Challenges and Strategy" (16 May 1991) via Fred Warshofsky (1994), The Patent Wars. This is a misreading of Warshofsky's text; the quotation is actually from League for Programming Freedom (1991), "Against Software Patents." An example of the misattribution appears in Lawrence Lessig (2001), The future of ideas.