> You make money by licensing your inventions to companies that have means to create a product. That's assuming that I have something to license. Abolishing p

> You make money by licensing your inventions to companies that have means to create a product. That's assuming that I have something to license. Abolishing patents or requiring me to practice means that I don't. > You can use trade secrets and copyright to protect your invention. Neither one applies to processor features. For example, I invented a new way to do branch prediction. Copyright would apply to any documents that I produce or to the mask that someone used to implement that feature, but a new processor, by definition, wouldn't use that same mask or even a portion thereof. As to copyright, a processor company can implement without copying any document (and even if someone did copy, the damages are at most $250k if I can prove it, which is going to be expensive). They merely need to read whatever description I provide. For similar reasons, trade secret is a non-starter. (You have to disclose many processor features to make them useful.) > What you'd be prevented from doing is creating an expansive definition of a market. Except that I'm not trying to do that. I'm trying to be compensated for inventing a new way to do branch prediction (for example).