> Public goods are chronically undersupplied in a normal market situation. We already have strong intellectual property protections, and yet you still claim we

> Public goods are chronically undersupplied in a normal market situation. We already have strong intellectual property protections, and yet you still claim we have an undersupply of those kinds of public goods? Is there a lack of software being produced? Is there a lack of books? Of blogs? If the right software algorithms or the right books or blog posts aren't being written, isn't it because we've broken culture to discourage sharing? Every good idea that generates the next great algorithm or the next amazing book or blog post is sparked mostly by other people's work. Standing on the shoulders of giants and all that. What we've done is to discourage free exchange of ideas and writings, without actually preventing it (piracy is still commonplace, just not in polite company). Western society has fetishized the ownership of practical ideas (inventions), as well as words and pictures and sounds, despite no evidence that it actually helps promote progress. IP creation is high-risk even with current IP protections. Reward (for labor) is highly variable. Most work ends up not being worth much. So the reluctance of most people to toil to invent something is due to not having the financial security (financial independence or a secure job) to do that. Most people who aren't famous can't live on a book advance, and there's no model for advances on not-yet-patented inventions. IP protection does not remove those barriers. > In fact the monopoly of the competitor gives them an incentive to find new ideas that the competitor hasn't found yet, an incentive which was weaker in the original situation. In the software patent world, when that happens, the competitor typically isn't inventing new groundbreaking ideas as a result of being forced to; they're hacking around the patent in very obvious ways, sometimes resorting to sub-par alternatives. Why? to avoid paying a ridiculous patent license fee which the patent holder is using as a moat rather than the original intention of recouping whatever sales they'd lose to their competitor. Companies like Apple and Amazon, if they don't get to wage cold wars against their competitors for things like 1-click or whichever corner or symbol you use to get your phone to do something, would soldier on and continue selling mobile devices. Not only would it not make any difference to anyone, but it would increase interoperability since companies would be more likely to reuse familiar design patterns. Here's a pure algorithm-design case study on the horrible effects of patents even by non-trolls: h.265 patents discouraged and slowed down mass adoption and prompted a bunch of major companies to waste a lot of time developing a marginally superior but much less efficient alternative in AV1. And for what? What poor starving coder wouldn't have developed h.265 except for the piles of gold bars they received for their effort? Wait... they did get piles of gold bars, didn't they?