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   Anonymous Coward, May 5th, 2005 @ 4:02pm

   
   

   Does IP laws motivate innovation or slow it down? If there were no IP laws, would people be as motivated to innovate? Tough question in my opinion but I am interested in what others have to say.

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   Tim, May 6th, 2005 @ 9:57am

   
   

   Good question. If you had no IP laws at all, no copyright, everything effectively be public domain. That's not an area in which we see much activity these days. If you just have copyright, that can be more or less fair: it says "I made this", and stamps out all further distribution or modification, so you need licensing as well. What you don't need is patents: unlike copyright and copyleft licenses that permit you to do things, patents exist solely in order to *threaten* you not to code something in the privacy of your own home. Application to motivation level should be obvious - with no patents around, I'd be considerably more motivated to write more code than I do; without licenses, I probably wouldn't be; without copyright, I might be happier again.

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   Anonymous Coward, May 6th, 2005 @ 9:59am

   
   

   Here's another place.

   I'll mention that there's been a number of patent lawsuits in this "EDA" space.

   This site is a user's group for the products of one of the larger companies in EDA.

   -cmh

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