Yes, when you look at phenomena in retrospect, you can decide that all kinds of things are the sole unique cause of other things that happened afterwards In ge

Yes, when you look at phenomena in retrospect, you can decide that all kinds of things are the sole unique cause of other things that happened afterwards In general, it's very easy, starting with a model and a bunch of phenomena, to explain why all the phenomena fit the model, regardless of what the model is. This is why we care about things like randomized controlled trials or recording when a hypothesis fails to predict a result in science It's also ridiculous to claim that monetary investment in a context that does have a strong concept of IP demonstrates that it creates more innovation: My whole argument is that the value of IP is to hoard it in order to make money, and companies invest in things that produce it because it will make them money. Given the financial incentives involved, it is vacuously true that this will happen under the current laws, and this has no bearing on whether this is more efficient or produces or encourages innovation In software, a considerable amount of innovation does happen in FOSS, and gets re-used in industry to build products. This just doesn't get captured as said technologies (libraries, drivers, etc) turning a profit themselves because again, the laws as they currently exist do strongly incentivize, with money, doing things the way the most profitable corporations in this space do it, tautologically Intel contributing to FOSS is a great example of why a company would care about FOSS even in the absence of IP: Intel sells, first and foremost, a physical good that it has invested considerably in infrastructure to produce, which involves a supply chain, equipment, and material expertise that is expensive and difficult to replicate, much less at the scale that lowers their costs. Without software, that physical product would be of little value to most people, but without patents on the chips, Intel would still be able to manufacture and sell chips and turn a profit