@Maddus Mattus: Einstein couldn't market his formula per se. Patents protect the invest made in bringing something to market, in producing a product - not the actual science - their ultimate purpose is to encourage the disclosure of the science.
That said I think patents are far, far too widely used. Most software, for example, should just be covered under copyright law. I think there is room for potentially patenting algorithms but the abuse of patents for supposedly standard things like H.264 and to exercise undue control over someone's possessions (eg. for CSS (the DVD copy protection system)) means I'm not likely to be sympathetic to the tech industry when it comes to where I think the line should be drawn.
Design patents, for the most part, are utter bull crap. We have something called copyright for that.
wrt. Kinect - that's a very industry specific example - it's much easier to make a drug that someone else has invested (potentially) billions of pounds to discover than it was to discover the drug. In that situation no patents --> no innovation. (An out of patent drug produced by a generics manufacturer is exactly the same as the drug produced by the original manufacture under patent (in the west where generics manufacturers can be trusted, at least) - there's no quality difference or other way for the products to be differentiated.)
