> Consider the patents held by MPEG LA (MPEG codecs, Firewire, H.264, etc.) These patents represent years of R&D work by their member companies and describe inventions that are non-frivolous. Surely these companies deserve some kind of protection for their work to encourage them to continue to invest in such research and publish it.
There are two separate issues here, (1) whether patents are necessary to encourage innovation, and (2) whether companies "deserve" patents.
To answer the first question, the existance of non-patent-emcumbered codecs, such as Ogg Vorbis and Ogg Theora, demonstrates that software patents don't need to exist for these things to exist. (I sometimes half-jokingly refer to arguments of the sort "but without copyright/patent incentives, X wouldn't exist" as "the Linux-doesn't-exist theory of intellectual property").
To answer the second question, why would companies deserve patents? So they can make bigger profits, presumably? But why is that a good thing? The purpose of the economy isn't for companies to make profits, it's for the economy to make things people need and want. Companies making big profits is a good thing if and only if it leads to the economy making things people need and want -- so if people want to make money they have to make something people want, not game the patent system to no-one else's advantage. And since software patents aren't necessary to produce good software, and since they in fact overall harm progress in software rather than help it, in the interests of the economy they shouldn't exist.
> To answer the first question, the existance of non-patent-emcumbered codecs, such as Ogg Vorbis and Ogg Theora, demonstrates that software patents don't need to exist for these things to exist.
This is an extremely bad example. Ogg Vorbis came years after rival standards (such as mp3). It is not state of the art at all.
The development of the basis of Theora (VP3) was done by a company (On2) that protected it with patents. VP3 was a very old decoder that On2 released (all of their current state of the art decoders are protected by patents).
"but without copyright/patent incentives, X wouldn't exist" as "the Linux-doesn't-exist theory of intellectual property"
Linux was based on Unix. Unix was developed and marketed by a company that enforced its intellectual property in it. Would they have funded both activities without any way to own the results (i.e. copyright)? If Unix did not exist, would Linux?
Unix was developed as a side result of a couple hackers wanting to play a game that wouldn't run well on the systems available, so they ported it to a new system and then wrote an OS for that system as well (because hey, why not). At the time, they were being paid to pretty much screw around with technology by virtue of working at a large research facility funded by a corporation with a government-granted monopoly.
Unix wasn't even officially acknowledged by Bell Labs until a couple years after it was developed, and wasn't marketed for use outside the labs until a few years later.
So, no, I don't think the early development of Unix had much to do with the ability to enforce intellectual property.
The comment was about development, not just "early development"; and it was about development and marketing, not just development.
The value of an operating system derives primarily from the applications that run on it, and this is very much affected by the business case, which includes ongoing development and marketing. Unix had that.
Even for the early development, I wonder if Thompson and Richie (and the rest of the team) would have been employed to create software in general in the first place, if their employer would not have some form of ownership in it... Doesn't sound like how a monopolist thinks to me.
This is not to deride linux (which is great; I'm using it now), but to note the role that copyright plays in securing investment in a platform. Attracting users to a platform requires a lot of investment; it's much, much more than just building the platform technology.
I think a much better example to support your case is Python (also Perl/Ruby/PHP/emacs). Very successful; a platform; and not a replication of a commercial platform. In contrast, many successful open source projects follow commercial projects. Why is this? There's pre-existing demand for it; and having a technical guide and an existing user-base makes it comparatively straightforward and reduces the risk (i.e. compared with starting something entirely new).
I speak as someone who has replicated an existing product; and is now creating something entirely new. I find the latter tremendously more demanding. There's no pre-existng technical guide, and there's pre-existing demand for this particular approach.
There are two separate issues here, (1) whether patents are necessary to encourage innovation, and (2) whether companies "deserve" patents.
To answer the first question, the existance of non-patent-emcumbered codecs, such as Ogg Vorbis and Ogg Theora, demonstrates that software patents don't need to exist for these things to exist. (I sometimes half-jokingly refer to arguments of the sort "but without copyright/patent incentives, X wouldn't exist" as "the Linux-doesn't-exist theory of intellectual property").
To answer the second question, why would companies deserve patents? So they can make bigger profits, presumably? But why is that a good thing? The purpose of the economy isn't for companies to make profits, it's for the economy to make things people need and want. Companies making big profits is a good thing if and only if it leads to the economy making things people need and want -- so if people want to make money they have to make something people want, not game the patent system to no-one else's advantage. And since software patents aren't necessary to produce good software, and since they in fact overall harm progress in software rather than help it, in the interests of the economy they shouldn't exist.