I am against (all) patents on the following grounds:
The article talks about first-mover advantage.. it seems to me that the case for or against patents depends on how you model it.
If you model it as a single-shot prisoner's dilemma, then without patents, there is no incentive to make result of research public. This is a classical argument in favor of patents.
On the other hand, if you model it as a many-rounds prisoner's dilemma, then even without patents, it makes sense for companies to have a strategy which makes some results of research public, then hopefully piggyback on the research that was done by others and also published (that is, mutually cooperate).
It seems to me that the second strategy can only be viable if the results of the research are "infinitely divisible", that is, companies can make arbitrarily small steps in opening up their research.
However, I don't see any evidence that the research is NOT infinitely divisible, thus it seems to me that patents are not really needed for the latter to happen.
In addition, interestingly, economists generally approve patents as needed for someone to make the first move, but they don't feel the same about similar issues that happen in the market. For example, somebody needs to explore new market first or make a capital investment in a new field - economists do not call for government support in that. This convinces me that the rationale for patents is somewhat hypocritical defense of status quo (caused by rather arbitrary choice in the game theoretical model).
This dovetails with the case for enterprise open source quite nicely.
We continually make more and more complicated things. The time in which we iterate also decreases. I can see the argument that patents were useful at a time where an iteration could take decades or more. However, I'm sure we're well past the point of usefulness for any patent system.
A lot of decision makers in companies are stuck in the mindset of trade secrets because that made sense at one point. Your company made a widget. Your goal was to make that widget better than the other widget makers. You (at least believed that you) had some breakthrough that made your widgets better and continued to make widgets in that style for years without much change. In that time, you protected how you achieved the breakthrough. Patents helped with this.
Today, a lot of the money is not really in creating widgets. It's in creating digital recreations of widgets (e-widget) that accomplish the same task [0]. You don't pay much overhead per copy of e-widgets, so prototyping and "mass production" is fast and cheap. You can iterate at increasingly faster paces. It is not worth it to you to protect how you differentiate your e-widgets once it comes out [1]. You're already working on the next version. If you spend a lot of resources on protecting how you achieved your previous iteration(s), you are doomed to fall behind [1].
Once a company falls so far behind, it makes more sense (but only in the short term) to double down on your protection efforts. This is how we end up with the cable company ISP situation in the US. It is easier [2] to fight in the legal system than it is to a) spend on the R&D to improve your networks and b) actually roll out those changes.
These are just my observations. I have some ideas on solutions but obviously don't really know what would work. I doubt any one thing would work for every company, but I know (long term) a lot more are either going to need to adapt to a more open mindset or continue to spend more and more to protect their closed mindset. The latter is probably more likely for the foreseeable future.
[0]: Realistically, the real money is in trading investments in potential value of creating digital recreations of widgets, but that's a different conversation. At some point, you usually have to create the widget / digital recreation, so we'll continue to talk about that.
IP is fundamentally different from property as me know it.
Something is your property if you have exclusive control over it. Since IP is not exclusive (two people can have the same thought), it is not property.
Patents are the worse form of IP, since it is possible to accidentally infringe on them.
Copyright is almost as bad, especially at current timespans, and because it has such a chilling effect on the internet and other media.
Trademarks are essentially just defenses from fraud, so they aren't really IP.
As gowld already pointed out, the distinction between traditional property and "intellectual property" is not as strong as it is often painted.
I would say for the larger part, the exclusivity in both is artificial. As gowld points out, for many physical things there exist fair sharing schemes. And historically, when public lands were enclosured to become private property, it was an artificial process which explicitly created the exclusion. This exclusion wasn't needed from economic point of view.
If I hang out in your house and borrow your computer when you aren't home, I'm not depriving you of anything. Yet your property rights can be wielded against me. Why?
The article talks about first-mover advantage.. it seems to me that the case for or against patents depends on how you model it.
If you model it as a single-shot prisoner's dilemma, then without patents, there is no incentive to make result of research public. This is a classical argument in favor of patents.
On the other hand, if you model it as a many-rounds prisoner's dilemma, then even without patents, it makes sense for companies to have a strategy which makes some results of research public, then hopefully piggyback on the research that was done by others and also published (that is, mutually cooperate).
It seems to me that the second strategy can only be viable if the results of the research are "infinitely divisible", that is, companies can make arbitrarily small steps in opening up their research.
However, I don't see any evidence that the research is NOT infinitely divisible, thus it seems to me that patents are not really needed for the latter to happen.
In addition, interestingly, economists generally approve patents as needed for someone to make the first move, but they don't feel the same about similar issues that happen in the market. For example, somebody needs to explore new market first or make a capital investment in a new field - economists do not call for government support in that. This convinces me that the rationale for patents is somewhat hypocritical defense of status quo (caused by rather arbitrary choice in the game theoretical model).