tit-for-tat patent portfolio) of established dominant market players. Taking the growing list of reported patent claims against Android as just one case in point, it appears as though the value of the whole - the Android operating system - is very much less than the sum of the licensing fees claimed for just a small subset of its parts. Software patents are threatening the market take-up of a new technology and therefore are a threat to innovation.  It's hardly surprising, as change is not in the interests of those currently profiting from any monopolistic position, in software or otherwise, and innovation is change. It also leads to some interesting accounting problems when accountants value intangibles like intellectual property.  Because the market has got used to seeing inflated prices that price individual parts so highly, I believe there's a real risk that many technology companies are over-valued.   This over-valuation can lead to over-leveraging (borrowing against assets), and therefore contribute to boom and bust. How much have you insured your mp3 player for? The sum of the whole argument also fails the common sense test when considering the way music is consumed in the digital era, i.e. without physical restrictions on the manufacture, shipping, retail and storage of physical media. A 64GB digital music player can hold around 10,000 tracks.  In old money that's around 900 LPs - which would require approximately 4 metres of shelf space to store and weight approx 200kg. Here's the rub - if you bought each track