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My story is an exact contradiction to your last point. By the way, you're*.

• dangus 5y ago
  Your story absolutely isn’t a counterexample. It’s blind luck that the situation you described led to innovation. Even if it did lead to innovation, it still wasted a month of time that could have been invested in more impactful innovations. You were still forced to hold out on shipping for a month entirely due to the patent system. The alternate ending to that story could have very easily (and more likely) been “we had to scrap the feature because there was no way to do it without violating the patent.” Or the result could have been that they only alternative you came up with was worse. Or the result could have been that you needed to pay the other company a licensing fee. Essentially you just got lucky that the competitor didn’t think of the best idea first, because if they had you’d be forced to ship something inferior. For example, Amazon patented buying something with one click. How do you propose innovating around that? You can’t, you have to license the patent from Amazon or add another step to your checkout process. There’s only one way for one click to buy something.