Hi, above I said that IP forces everybody to pretend that a profit opportunity is a capital good. That is not a religious argument. It is an economic argument. If you are mistaken about the economics of something, there will be real-world costs.

Your example of the wright bros. does not take into account the "unseen". In other words, it is a foregone conclusion because you are ignoring the innovation that might have happened from other people, had there been no IP. We don't know what that would be, which is the problem with historical examples.

http://www.dklevine.com/general/intellectual/against.htm Please check out the book "Against Intellectual Monopoly" by Boldrine and Levine. The book attempts to compare similar industries that are different in terms of their intellectual property protection and argues that industries without are more innovative as a result of being more competitive. This is an empirical argument that purports to approximate a contro...