Over at Patently-O, Dennis Crouch talks about patents and apportionment.

The Patent Reform Acts of 2007 (both House and Senate) propose changes to damage calculations that would require specific economic analysis to ensure that any reasonable royalty damage award captures "only [the] economic value properly attributable to the patent's specific contribution over the prior art."

Consider the Free Software Foundation's position on apportionment; that an item of code should infect an entire system because of its moral value. No wonder the Free Software Foundation opposes patents so much, it does not understand the meaning of the term "reasonable."