The story of the Watt patent holding up steam development has been busted as a myth: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1589712 http://papers.s

The story of the Watt patent holding up steam development has been busted as a myth: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1589712 http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1589712 The Wright patent certainly was influential and used all over the place. Their litigation did force the invention of alternatives. Innovation through forced workarounds had long been one of the rationalizations of patent systems. However, very few of them were non-infringing. Indeed a criticism of their patents was that they were way too broad and covered everything, but courts time and again gave them broad scope because they were deemed that inventive. As an aside, before anyone brings it up, the related story that the Wright patent held back the US airplane industry has also been shown to be a myth, as demonstrated by industrial data fun the period: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2355673 http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2355673 If you think work is stagnating in video codecs, it's mostly because the low hanging fruit had been picked. Examples of the patent system creating benefits (as well as costs) can be readily found by searching ssrn for keywords around patents. Focus on studies that use empirical data. Also if one study looks too convincing, look for others that cite it, there may be one that busts it :-) A lot of the conceptions people have about patents are based on falsehoods and uncritical acceptance of what somebody on the internet said. This need not be the case when we have a number of relevant studies to look at.