Vast and important domain of knowledge are now under IP protection. It means that society will evolve only at the speed the owner want it to. You could argue t

Vast and important domain of knowledge are now under IP protection. It means that society will evolve only at the speed the owner want it to. You could argue that it is better than nothing. But this you will only know if 50 years when others will have caught up and we'll realize (or not) that things could have been much faster if stuff was more open. Google opens up its articles, codes, but sure not its infrastructure. Now does public funded efforts do better, or would do better if they had the financial power of Google ? That's the question. I believe so, but that's rather an idealist point of view.