"Creating intellectual 'property' permits those with useful ideas to safely license those ideas such that they can share their ideas with the world without losing their profit stream." The classic example is the Chamberlin forceps: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forceps_in_childbirth#History It's argued in Superfreakanomics (a book I have a number of problems with) that had patent law existed at the time the Chamberlin forceps were invented, tens of thousands of women and children would not have died in childbirth. As it is, the Chamberlin forceps remained a family secret for over 150 years. The counter-argument, of course, is that there was absolutely no part of the World Wide Web that was ever created by private enterprise, and that the structure, the implementation, the roll-out, the support, the maintenance and the future development of the World Wide Web were all bought and paid for by government money, collected from the people by way of taxes. I have no doubts whatsoever that had ARPANet been a product of Bell Labs, rather than the Advanced Research Projects Agency, we would all be paying a monthly fee for something structured remarkably similar to long distance telephony or cable television. THAT is the part that our friend the attorney misses.