Thats not really correct, I believe. First, I believe there may be a confusion between patent law and copyright law. Regardless of whether the patent system continues to exist or not, copyright still protects code. So that code could not be used or modified by another party, only the ideas embodied in that code could be used.
Second, Microsoft has the marketshare and money to push out any small entity attempting to compete with them. Consider as an analog the netflix v blockbuster issue, which i admittedly have not followed much. Blockbuster has no incentive to create an innovative movie delivery system because it owns the movie rental marketplace already. Netflix, without patents has little incentive to innovate because Blockbuster could immediately overtake that market. I believe the outcome there was that Blockbuster has some inferior rental service in which there still are late fees charged because Netflix has a patent on an innovative rental system that they risked much money on creating.
Similarly, in the software world, the army of MS coders could easily reproduce the ideas of a smaller company's code if there were no patent protection on those ideas, but the few people working on the smaller companies programs would have a more difficult time reproducing the larger number of ideas embodied in the Microsoft code in the same time period.
Accordingly, MS would be able to adopt more good and novel ideas stolen from a number of small companies in a faster and scaleably efficient way, beating smaller companies to the market at a cheaper price. This would effectively eliminate the incentive to start a small company and the incentive for big companies to innovate at all.
Providing incentives to create innovative softwares seems like a pretty good justification to allow software patents.
Microsoft, Intel, IBM, etc. would probably love to get rid of the patent system all together. Its partly this system that forces them to continually innovate to stay leaders in their fields. Without the patent system in place, nothing would prevent the Microsofts from pushing their innovation costs onto smaller more innovative companies without compensating those companies in any way. As soon as a technology seems to be potentially successful, the Microsofts could adopt it and easily use their immense market share to force the small guys out. With patents around, at least the small guy get to make a profit through patent cases (if they invent something good) and Microsoft is forced to try to innovate on its own if it wants to avoid paying the small guys for patent infringement.
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Thats not really correct, I believe. First, I believe there may be a confusion between patent law and copyright law. Regardless of whether the patent system continues to exist or not, copyright still protects code. So that code could not be used or modified by another party, only the ideas embodied in that code could be used.
Second, Microsoft has the marketshare and money to push out any small entity attempting to compete with them. Consider as an analog the netflix v blockbuster issue, which i admittedly have not followed much. Blockbuster has no incentive to create an innovative movie delivery system because it owns the movie rental marketplace already. Netflix, without patents has little incentive to innovate because Blockbuster could immediately overtake that market. I believe the outcome there was that Blockbuster has some inferior rental service in which there still are late fees charged because Netflix has a patent on an innovative rental system that they risked much money on creating.
Similarly, in the software world, the army of MS coders could easily reproduce the ideas of a smaller company's code if there were no patent protection on those ideas, but the few people working on the smaller companies programs would have a more difficult time reproducing the larger number of ideas embodied in the Microsoft code in the same time period.
Accordingly, MS would be able to adopt more good and novel ideas stolen from a number of small companies in a faster and scaleably efficient way, beating smaller companies to the market at a cheaper price. This would effectively eliminate the incentive to start a small company and the incentive for big companies to innovate at all.
Providing incentives to create innovative softwares seems like a pretty good justification to allow software patents. Microsoft, Intel, IBM, etc. would probably love to get rid of the patent system all together. Its partly this system that forces them to continually innovate to stay leaders in their fields. Without the patent system in place, nothing would prevent the Microsofts from pushing their innovation costs onto smaller more innovative companies without compensating those companies in any way. As soon as a technology seems to be potentially successful, the Microsofts could adopt it and easily use their immense market share to force the small guys out. With patents around, at least the small guy get to make a profit through patent cases (if they invent something good) and Microsoft is forced to try to innovate on its own if it wants to avoid paying the small guys for patent infringement.