You think that we need patents to disseminate ideas widely? That's a faulty premise.

His point is that without the system of patents, inventors would never reveal anything to the public.

What's interesting I think is how the web has proven this to be utterly demonstrably false - we see staggeringly valuable and complex webapps written entirely in trivially reverse-engineerable Javascript and HTML. I can't count the number of times I saw a cool technique and within minutes figured out how they did it using only tools built into just about every browser. Now it's true that given the option companies will absolutely obfuscate to the maximum extent possible (eg: for a while you would see stuff built in Flash purely to obfuscate it) - but the idea that people won't develop products at all merely because they can't protect their secrets just seems to be utterly false. In fact competition seems to thrive beyond all measure when revealing secrets is forced by the technology.

I think that's still not the point. A popular website's trade secret is not necessarily its source code. You can copy facebook's code from soup to nuts but you are not going to be nearly as successful.

On the other hand, imagine someone found out a way to cure cancer. If he just releases his formula, then there's a very good chance that he will not make any money off of it at all. Without patent protection, he will probably hoard the discovery for years while building a company of his own to sell the drug. Finally, the drugs will be available, and yet the public will still have no knowledge of how to develop the drug, improve it even further, or apply it to other diseases.

I'm not personally a big fan of patents. I'm merely addressing your comments, which I see to be somewhat irrelevant.

I don't see a problem here. If a patent is granted for the cure for cancer, then the products will most likely be very expensive because you have a monopoly on the cure. Poor people will not be able to buy the cure, so how has that helped them?

I think that's missing the point again. The point of a patent is so that the underlying technology is public. A patent system in fact does exactly what you suggest, which is to create a monopoly for a certain period of time so that the inventor can profit. But the existence of a patent implies that the formula for the cancer drug is out, and so other companies can use that to potentially create better versions or apply it to other areas.

In reality, what would happen without a patent is that someone would investigate the cure, work out how it is done, then make it better.

And that's a strawman.

Let me ask you, as a rational, profit-seeking individual or organization looking to secure revenue from your new invention in a patent-free society. Do you:

a. Volunteer the details of your invention to your competitors?

b. Keep these details secret?

Moreover, what would it take to get you to choose option a?

c. Appear to volunteer the details, but obfuscate them so deeply in patentese that nobody can ever tease them out, but I still get to sue my competitors.

How is that a strawman? He said that patents were introduced to allow ideas to be disseminated. That's a faulty premise.

However, to handle your own strawman, the answer is b. I'd keep the details secret. Which is not a problem, because there have been many, many occassions when someone reverse engineers the work or comes up with the idea completely independently.