The belief that patents are needed to promote invention is a faith-based belief, not a fact-based belief.
Get that silly nonsense out of your mind. It's not about "belief". That's garbage!
That's what this argument comes down to.
When "thinking" idealistically, you're not engaging in practical arguments. The argument comes down to the protection of ideas and innovation, which someone put a lot of time and hard work and even funding into.
Mike at the Techdirt web site has done a lot of investigation into patents and copyrights. He has found a lot of peer-reviewed research about them. As far as I know, he has not found any research that demonstrates that they are necessary to promote creation of inventions or new art, and, in fact, plenty of documented cases in which their absence has done no harm to such activity.
More garbage!
Your Mike very likely started with an agenda, and a predefined objective, and all that he was looking to get was a set of his own "facts" to prove his premise. Have you ever heard of "junk science"? Mike, very likely was engaged in "junk research". It's the same as phony polls where somebody with an agenda sets out to prove a political point, and just polls those who will agree with the pollster's premise.
For an easy example of this, just consider the software industry prior to the time the courts so inadvisedly permitted software patents to issue. There was tremendous progress made in a few decades, and no one seems to have been dissuaded from inventing software because they could not patent it.
The fact is that, with people being able to protect their patents and IP, that more people are encouraged to produce their own ideas and innovations and even unique software pieces. Fart apps are not unique, as an example, but there are a lot of pieces of software which somebody created the idea for, and later developed the idea. If that person was the first with the idea, then his/her work should be protected. Would the idea have been developed by somebody else anyway? Possible, but, there's no way of really determining that.
The fact is that, with patents and IP protections, there are millions of people engaged in trying to produce their own ideas and innovations and products. If there were no protections, then most of those people would be discouraged from using their creative and innovative minds. Some or many would still want to be creative, but, the pace of progress would be a lot slower than with the patent or IP protections in place.
You might say that is somehow a special case, but it is not the only one.
You still don't understand.
Ideas and innovations are not new and people were creative before people even thought of patents. However, ideas and innovations and products, in the current world, do warrant patents, because, those ideas and innovations and products, represent a lot of time and effort and money invested by the individuals or companies that produced them. Without those protections, you would still be in the 1800s, where the horse and buggy would be your basic means of transportation.
Go look at Mike's posts on the subject.
Mike is a very bad example of somebody to be quoting from, because, he's starting out with an agenda.
There is no evidence that patents are necessary, and lots of evidence that they are, in fact, a bad idea.
When I look around the world today, I see a place where patents have enriched everybody with technology and communications capabilities and medicines and transportation and entertainment and food and education and pure knowledge, and all of those things would not be in the current stage they're in without patent protections. Without patents, development of ideas would be at a very tiny fraction of their current rate.
As an example, I'm in the middle of trying to develop an idea, for news/information/views/opinion that will be internet based with a complicated database for access and searching capabilities, and if I knew that my work were to be open for anybody to copy and use my ideas as their own, then I wouldn't even bother in trying to develop the idea into a product. And believe me, though it sounds like what you can find on the internet right now, it's far from it.
It wouldn't be the first time that major social/economic policy was based on a fallacy.
There is no more fallacious argument than that which is based on hypothetical situations, where people make assumptions about how things would have turned out if conditions had been different. The real fact is that, innovation and ideas have been coming at a much faster pace since patent and IP protections were set up, than before. The modern day Da Vincis and Galileos and Newtons and Graham Bells, would still be doing their things, but, the many other thousands, and millions (if you include innovations within companies), would not be happening.
Your Mike and you are operating with very narrow minds and without any real concept of how things work in the real world.
