That's exactly what is happening in a country that does have the corresponding IP law and the IP law is enabling the practice rather than fighting it. In other news: war is peace, ignorance is strength, and freedom is slavery. Carry on!
That hardly follows. "IP" has very different properties than land, and "no ownership framework" is hardly the only alternative under consideration.
Even to the extent that land ownership and idea ownership can be analogized, using the former to justify the later is a poor argument on account of the enormous known systematic problems with the former. In particular, there's a reason why economists borrowed the term "rent" to mean "benefit received for non-produced input."
> The thing to do now is understand it.
That doesn't justify anything either. Did organized crime just take over your neighborhood? Understanding their priorities will help you deal with the problem, but it doesn't make them good and it doesn't make them worth protecting.
The point of patent laws is to encourage the spread of knowledge. To put it another way, it's NOT yours, but we'll let you act like it for a bit in order to make sure the knowledge gets out. If we've created a situation where the "land of ideas" is remaining fallow, then the process isn't working as intended.
> The problem I believe, is that software innovators are taught not to worry about patents
Who's the innovator? What side of the worry?
The software companies I've been in have been all about MAKING patents. Teaching special classes, polling workers to see if they've done anything patentable.
Worrying about violating patents is a different story.
Meanwhile, as an individual coder doing anything outside a corporate market, the message is that it's too expensive and difficult to "worry" about violating them.
I think you mean, ‘has fallow spots’. It seems to me that writing law is similar to building software systems; you always want a perfectly effective and economical system but you never have that ideal. So good engineers don’t stand up and say this system isn’t perfect, it’s obvious. What’s the proposed improvement? That is interesting.
You don't need patents to build software but you need land for crops.
The patent is the land, not the crop. The products that can be produced with the patent are the crops, with which it is impossible to have without the patent. Think of it this way, you spend years cracking a new invention. You bring it to market. You immediately go out of business because a larger company takes your invention and sells it at half the price you can because they don't need to recoup your R&D costs. Without patents you cannot protect against this circumstance.
Trade secrets don't protect against this because trade secrets don't protect against reverse-engineering whereas patents do. Patents are a temporary monopoly. Trade secrets can last indefinitely. Patents have a relatively short lifetime, though people do argue one still too-long for software.
I think this scenario is more realistic.
The problem I believe, is that software innovators are taught not to worry about patents. Perhaps this attitude helps the VC shops who are experts at it, and it gives them an information advantage. I don’t know who feeds the myth.
In a right-thinking world, we would look at this situation and say Airbnb just started farming on land that was unclearly owned. This is the natural consequence.