Though I’m glad that you seem to agree that today intellectual monopolies are only useful for halting competition for their duration

I didn’t say that at all. In fact, my feeling is that patents in particular actually drive companies to find alternate solutions in order to be in desirable market places, and that often leads to advances that otherwise might never happen.

It doesn’t halt competition – it makes smarter, harder working competition coming to market not with a replica product, but with a new product, possibly a better product, and a product that achieves the result in a different way.

In that respect, we got double the development and competition, with products competing on their merits rather than their ability to replicate each other.

It’s the reason why we have Ipads, Samsung Galaxy, HP pads, and everything down through the Kindle: Different technologies, different operating systems, different designs, different functionality. There is no patent or copyright getting in the way of innovation here, if anything it has encouraged people to take different paths and we are blessed in a very short time with a wide selection of products that operate in this new niche market.

As for your second point, I can assure you it takes a bit longer than 200ms to bring a product to market, even if you are just copying somebody else’s product.

200ms is the time it takes to connect from a remote location almost anywhere on the internet today. Secrets start moving that fast. All the design and research documents for that new product you are planning can be “accidentally” transfered to someone on the other side of the world in minutes, all because the delay from here to there is 200ms or less.

Look at the Greeks and the Romans — they didn’t have copyrights or patents.

No, they had no need for them – they had communication at the speed of a man walking, it might take years for information to spread. They didn’t have any pressing economic reasons to have IP laws. But they were also both societies and times that were filled with secrets, scientists as kept pets of the rich, and so on. The true values of a man’s discoveries in that time may not be discovered until long after his death. Secrecy is many times worse that a patent system.

But to add an obelix to that, there is of course absolutely no way to tell if the speedup of human progress was because of the patent system.

That is true, but it is also true that there is no indication that there is any significant impediment put in place by the system. As I said, Mike will toss up his needlessly complicated “patent thicket” graphic every so often to try to make a point, but he rarely addresses the facts of rapid development of cell and smart phones. He won’t look at not only competitive products, but also the competing technologies that have rapidly advanced the market place. For all the hand ringing going on by the IP deniers, progress is going gangbusters, and your two year old cell phone is already incredibly far out of date.

Reality is right there to grasp, it is just amazing that Mike chooses to ignore it.