The fact of the matter is that countries with weak IP laws and/or enforcement see less innovation. It makes sense too, the calculus is easy: rip someone’s tested idea off for free, or invest huge piles of money just to get your foot in the door?
Do you really believe that software patents represent anything close to an original idea? From my perspective, Software patents are on such stupid things utterly divorced from anything that could be considered innovative, that none of it incentivizes inovation.
The calculus also doesn't seem all that clear to me. A alternative calculus: Build something new on top of someone else's idea (stand on the shoulders of giants) or spend all your time and money reinventing a perfectly good wheel so that you can do it in a slightly different manner purely for legal reasons.
The causality probably goes in the opposite direction. Countries without IP don't care much about protecting it. Countries with IP care about protecting it.
A case in point is China. It used to just produce low-value-added manufactured products, and it had little IP protection to speak of. But as China has moved up the value chain, it has passed IP laws and built out a court system to enforce them. It has rapidly become one of the most active venues for IP litigation in the world. But if there were no Chinese R&D to protect, there would be little reason for China to build out this system.
Citation needed. Historically this has not been true (I pointed to a famous example with pharmaceuticals further up) and it is also not true for companies, i.e. companies that patent a lot do usually not have the highest R&D budgets relatively.
Assuming that statistic is true, how do you know countries with more innovation don't just end up producing big corporations that lobby for more control over ideas that they don't want to compete for?
