What if it takes more than a year? What if they are working much harder to invent something than regular, $100k employment? What if not everyone has the ability

What if it takes more than a year? What if they are working much harder to invent something than regular, $100k employment? What if not everyone has the ability to do it? What if, for many programmers who pour in the resources, they don't end up inventing anything (or the market doesn't materialise, they're too late etc)? Why should anyone do all that if it's not protected? For the argument of encouraging investment, the investment should be measured accurately, including risk. Note: I'm talking about real invention (e.g. relational database, regular expression searching), almost all software patents aren't. EDIT to clarify: (1) if someone is more capable, more educated, more talented, works longer, works harder etc, you generally must pay them more, hence greater capital investment. (2) To reward success in a risky endeavour is not about rewarding "luck", but making the reward worth the risk, in order to encourage others. This is an economics-and-law argument for patents by analogy with high-risk resource exploration (e.g. gold, oil).