It's also less effective because of double-dipping intellectual proprietary systems. Of a single part of a software product a company can enjoy trade-secret pr

It's also less effective because of double-dipping intellectual proprietary systems. Of a single part of a software product a company can enjoy trade-secret protection, copyright, and patent protection... then they multiply the force many fold with burdensome one sided 'license agreements'. This is possible because the bar for disclosure in patents has basically been put at zero. If the patent teaches the invention in question to a single hypothetical omnipotent expert in the art, then it meets the disclosure bar. In many fields patents are obfuscated beyond belief and it is pointless to read them: You'll learn nothing. Simultaneously, parties keep their source code secret-- but distributed binaries which are obfuscated forms of the source that effectively hide their design, and they use the force of anti-circumvention provisions of copyright law to threaten people who would reverse engineer the software (perhaps to extract some information about the 99.9% of non-patented ideas in it). And yet they enjoy a long lasting copyright protection, the same as other works which are made transparent through their publication. The patent system on its own is unbalanced, especially for software good which have a much lower resource requirements for their exploration... but when coupled with the other schemes that were hardly envisioned to overlap, the result creates incredible costs, stifles innovation, and is generally bad for society.