Further no company would bother with R&D because as soon as they make a breakthrough everyone else will simply steal the idea and sell for pennies more than cost of production. R&D costs could never be recouped so no one would ever do it again.
That's always the rhetoric but in practice patents usually protect big companies at the expense of the little guy. This is especially true in software, where getting the patent is generally a lot more expensive than creating the invention. Only the big companies can afford to file patents for every little trick of coding they come up with.
And for all types of inventions, it's generally very expensive to litigate.
All sorts of inventive software was created before there were software patents, so empirically, it's clear that in this business at least we don't need patents.
The kind of men who refuse to engage themselves in creation without being prodded are the kind who patent most of the trivial ideas we see patented today.
As for your examples, Linus didn't invent. He made a version of an existing OS and started with an existing version of a copy of that OS. He did it for fun, but one must also recognize that he's gained a tremendous amount by this seemingly "benevolent" action. Fresh out of college he could take much more interesting jobs than most people with his background could. His "gift" ended up being a loss leader for his career.
So if we were reliant on only having people like Tesla to push us forward we'd be nowhere near where we are today. Tesla was brilliant but there are just far too few people who think and work as he did.
You've got to be kidding. Do you know nothing about the history of software?
"If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today’s ideas were invented, and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today."--Bill Gates
so, please cite.
Who do you think you are that you can tell people on what terms they can cite a quote from the New York Times? No, I am not going to do a scientific research paper tracing the historical roots of this oft-cited (in reputable media) quote.
Please take your head and pull it out of your ass.
I don't agree with people filing this lawsuit. I don't think their idea is all that novel. I also think patents shouldn't last longer then it takes to recoup the investment.
TL;DR = People don't work that way, but yeah the patent system is currently ridiculous.
The point is that they ought to work that way. People can and should change. Answering "well they don't work that way" as an argument against this is fallacious. I mean, take your argument and apply it to (say) cannibals. A cannibalistic tribe would say "well, we eat people, we've always eaten people, therefore things will never change."
There can't be a logical, rational argument for patents. Which is unsurprising, since patents are clearly barbaric. So barbarians defend patents using (surprise) barbaric illogic.