That's very much the truth. The software patent system as it is now curtails innovation more than protects it. If it existed in the 70's the way it does now, Apple would've been sued to oblivion sometime after the release of the Apple II. And if they did somehow manage to survive that, then they would've been crippled with licensing fees over the Lisa/Mac. Xerox would've had their nuts in a vice over the GUI.
Their only choice for anything approaching a sustainable business model would've been for the Steves to sell out to Xerox, HP, or IBM, and become one of their subsidiaries.
OMG! Imagine if Xerox PARC had ownership over all they invented there. OMG! Laser printers... Network cards... Possibly the mouse... The iconic GUI... Ethernet... On and on and on... All that, and you could ride your bike down the halls... Life WAS simpler back then... And apparently a whole lot more fun...
Shamelessly ripped off from Wikipedia: Xerox PARC has been the inventor and incubator of many elements of modern computing in the contemporary office work place:
Laser printers,
Computer-generated bitmap graphics
The Graphical user interface, featuring windows and icons, operated with a mouse
The WYSIWYG text editor
InterPress, a resolution-independent graphical page-description language and the precursor to PostScript
Ethernet as a local-area computer network
Fully formed object-oriented programming in the Smalltalk programming language and integrated development environment.
LCD displays.
CD ROM drives (Back then called Optical Disks)
They would OWN the computer industry pretty much and be larger than Apple and Microsoft (IF they existed at all) combined!