Look at countries with strong patent protection - the US. Look at the EU (which is less patent friendly). Which has more innovation in software? OK, the US. B

Look at countries with strong patent protection - the US. Look at the EU (which is less patent friendly). Which has more innovation in software? OK, the US. But that's mostly the result Silicon Valley. And there are a lot of non-US tech companies - Nokia (Finland), RIM (Canada - not sure where they stand), SAP (Germany). Then there's the open source stuff. Linux (Finland), MySQL (Sweden), PHP (Greenland / Canada), Python (Holland), HTML (from CERN), Pascal, ... lots of innovative stuff gets made in the EU, but the profits tend to be less concentrated. Well, in fairness: Fortran, C, UNIX, Apache, Perl, and PostGres are basically from US. Also, the GNU movement, but why would the EU need a free software revolution when they didn't have the stifling and secretive culture of the US?