> We already have strong intellectual property protections, and yet you still claim we have an undersupply of those kinds of public goods? Normal market situat

> We already have strong intellectual property protections, and yet you still claim we have an undersupply of those kinds of public goods? Normal market situation here refers to a competitive market without government intervention. Copyright, trademarks and patents are all government interventions. These greatly improve the attractiveness of creating software and publishing books. > 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. This is what I mean by knowledge being a public good. When it is shared, it becomes more valuable to society as a whole. But if sharing it is a burden with no prospect of profiting, less sharing will occur. Everyone wants to have a fire service, for example, but unless there is some mechanism to ensure everyone chips in, fire services will be undersupplied. > What we've done is to discourage free exchange of ideas and writings Patents are public. Trademarks are public. Copyrighted works are submitted to national libraries. It's harder and more expensive to get unpatented work. I can download any patent from the USPTO free. If I want to read a paper published by the ACM or IEEE then there is a good chance I'll have to pay for it. > 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. And sometimes they will come up with better alternatives. But without having the patent being public, they wouldn't have anywhere to begin, because the details are completely secret. Patent coverage can last for 20 years, but the concepts and possibilities it can create start from the instant the application is first published. Whereas a company sitting on the idea for 20 years doesn't spark anything. For anyone. At all.