Two points against Intellectual property laws

[Bremen]

Boro, thank you for that post. You're one of a very few people on this forum who are actually worth reading.

A few thoughts:
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that still would not justify the existence of patents, because there is no a priori "correct" amount of innovation

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True enough, however I do not think I go out on a limb when I say that the majority would prefer the case where innovation is maximized. Obviously you feel this is the case where time_of_patent = 0.


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Finally, the idea that entrepreneurs and businesses would simply throw up their hands and not innovate to stay ahead of the competition is, quite frankly, farcical to me. What are they going to do, sit on their capital and not invest it? Not try to turn a profit? Not attempt to beat out the competition? Whatever entrepreneurs and businessmen where that stupid would indeed stop innovating, rapidly go out of business and be replaced by entrepreneurs and innovators who chose not to sit on their hands and bitch that someone else "stole their idea".

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I do agree the idea that anyone would sit on capital is nonsense. However we must ask what they would do with it? In situations where we can "protect" our innovation with contracts not much will change. But if our innovation is obvious from our product we have no way of doing this (even if we have each customer sign a contract we have no viable recourse if they break the contract since the competitor isn't party to the contract). Thus we have a situation where the market will select against using capital for innovation (excepting situations such as when your competitor's lag time will be long enough to allow you to recoup your investment).