Finally, patents tend to favour inventions rather than innovations: upstream discoveries of principles, rather than downstream adaptation of devices to the market. This has led to the proliferation of what are known as patent thickets: vague intellectual property hedges that block the progress of people trying to move through the intellectual landscape and develop new products. This is a special problem in biotechnology, where innovators often find themselves infringing patents taken out by others relating to molecules they need to use in just a small part of their work. Startups find
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