establishes an invention as intellectual property
RMS wrote:
For example, the patent system was established to encourage inventors to disclose the details of their inventions. Its purpose was to help society rather than to help inventors. At the time, the life span of 17 years for a patent was short compared with the rate of the advance of the state of the art. Since patents are an issue only among manufacturers, for whom the cost and effort of a license agreement are small compared with setting up production, the patents often do not do much harm. They do not obstruct most individuals who use patented products. --GNU Manifesto
before the introduction of software patents.
- The Prior-Art-O-Matic thesurrealist.co.uk