There seem to be different classes of industries where the benefits and harm of patents are different. There are industries like pharma where the IP is difficu

There seem to be different classes of industries where the benefits and harm of patents are different. There are industries like pharma where the IP is difficult and expensive to create, but manufacturing (and reverse-engineering) it is relatively easy. Patents appear to be helpful in recouping R&D costs there (at least when and where they're enforced). There are also industries where both the IP and the implementation are costly and time consuming, notably the microchip industry. Intel is the perfect example - they derive significant value and competitive moat from both their CPU designs and their manufacturing capability. Do they need patents? I don't know the degree to which patents currently contribute to Intel's dominance, but it appears it would be difficult to catch up even with no patent protection on Intel IP whatsoever. And then there are industries where the IP is cheap and the implementation can be either cheap or costly, like software. This appears to be where patents on IP do more harm than good. The article expresses the problem very well: ... There's also a ridiculous quote from Rockstar's CEO, John Veschi: “A lot of people are still surprised to see the quality and the diversity of the IP that was in Nortel,” he says. “And the fundamental question comes back: ‘How the hell did you guys go bankrupt? Why weren’t you Google? Why weren’t you Facebook? Why weren’t you all these things, because you guys actually had the ideas for these business models before they did?’" The real answer, of course, is because patents are meaningless. Ideas are worth nothing by themselves. Ideas only matter if you execute, and anyone who's ever actually executed on an idea will tell you that the original idea almost is never reflected in the final product. The process of going from idea to actual product is a process by which you learn that what matters is not what you thought mattered. And yet, for reasons that make no sense to anyone who has ever actually built a product, creating monopolies around the ideas only serves to create a massive tollbooth towards actual innovation. And that's what we have here -- and it's funded by Apple and Microsoft.