Here is the thing: small business folks love free stuff. They love shifting costs onto other people. They think everything they have to pay for is a huge drain on the economy and everything they get for free is a justified incentivization of entrepreneurship.
Now don't get me wrong, I love small tech companies. The engineering companies I have worked at have been exclusively small tech companies. They're great. But most in the industry have constructed this idealization of the morally virtuous startup founder. Everyone likes free things, sure, but big companies at least seem to acknowledge the fact that they're inflating their profits at the cost to someone else. Small company culture doesn't do that. The AirBnB debate recently was a great example. People were decrying regulations that could undermine AirBnB, but it didn't even register to people that a lot of the "value created" by AirBnB was actually just costs that were shifted to the other residents of the building/surrounding community.
I see the same sort of thinking when patents come up on HN. There is this presumption of the morally virtuous innovator. Therefore, every $1 he must spend paying NPE's must be $1 of dead weight loss to society. There is no conception of the fact that some part of that $1 represents money he would rightfully have had to pay to the original patent holder, because (statistically!) he's not morally virtuous 100% of the time.
Now don't get me wrong, I love small tech companies. The engineering companies I have worked at have been exclusively small tech companies. They're great. But most in the industry have constructed this idealization of the morally virtuous startup founder. Everyone likes free things, sure, but big companies at least seem to acknowledge the fact that they're inflating their profits at the cost to someone else. Small company culture doesn't do that. The AirBnB debate recently was a great example. People were decrying regulations that could undermine AirBnB, but it didn't even register to people that a lot of the "value created" by AirBnB was actually just costs that were shifted to the other residents of the building/surrounding community.
I see the same sort of thinking when patents come up on HN. There is this presumption of the morally virtuous innovator. Therefore, every $1 he must spend paying NPE's must be $1 of dead weight loss to society. There is no conception of the fact that some part of that $1 represents money he would rightfully have had to pay to the original patent holder, because (statistically!) he's not morally virtuous 100% of the time.