> It would be nice to have a way to protect the "little guy" when they figured out a break through, showed it to the "big guy" and was then ripped off.

It was the "big guys" that lobbied for increased IP protections in the 1990's, for a pretty good reason: protection from foreign competitors. I worked with a big router company once, who told me that a Chinese company had ripped off their router designs down to the English silk-screened assembly instructions on the PCBs. All of the little-company versus big-company stuff is small potatoes compared to that overarching concern.

That's why a lot of big technology companies are still strong supporters of patents. They don't want Chinese companies copying their chips down to bugs in the firmware and undercutting them on the market because they don't have any need to recoup R&D costs.