I'd love to see some evidence for your claims, because they're pretty ridiculous. Arithmetic coding is now something that anyone can use because the patent appl

I'd love to see some evidence for your claims, because they're pretty ridiculous. Arithmetic coding is now something that anyone can use because the patent applying to it has reached the end of its term. If IBM had instead decided to keep the discovery as a trade secret, and no one else had figured out how to perform the same method of compression, we wouldn't to this day have access to it. But we do, this is clearly a benefit to society because we can now produce compression software with much closer to optimal compression rations than we could before. So there goes (1). Would you also say that arithmetic coding is obvious? It sure is, once it's explained to you, but discovering the idea took a lot of effort, and was definitely not obvious given the knowledge that existed before. So there goes (1). All that I would say is that I think the term for software protection is too long given the current pace of development in the software space. This will not be true forever though, like all other technologies, things will begin to slow, and discoveries will be even more valuable once the space of computer science is more broadly mapped.