The group that currently owns the patents, Allied Security Trust, buys them to protect its members from lawsuits. Composed of such companies as Google

A new post on AppleInsider has recently showed up which looks into ways win which Snow Leopard has improved security for Mac users, there have been many improvements in a lot of different areas of the OS, for full details check out AppleInsider.

One major change has been with warnings that show up when using Safari, previously Safari warned you when tried to enter sites which are known too distribute malicious software, however now Snow Leopard shows additional warnings when disk images are opened which contain known malware installers.

There are a lot more improvements which have been made within Safari, however rather than just repeat what has been said on AppleInsider I would highly recommend checking out thei