> IMO industry leaders have pressure to reinvest their profits in R&D and put it in their new products, regardless of whether they can get patent protection for

> IMO industry leaders have pressure to reinvest their profits in R&D and put it in their new products, regardless of whether they can get patent protection for them or not. This has obvious free-rider problems for things like new video streaming protocols. Why contribute to the development of next generation codecs, for example, if you can just copy the most successful solution of your competitors and get 80% of the benefit for none of the cost? (I say 80% because the competitor's solution will presumably not be totally optimized for your business needs)