Copyright and patents do serve some good purposes; this is why they were introduced in the first place.

It's the endless extension of copyright (hello, Mickey Mouse) and granting excessively wide patent rights (e.g. on whole classes of chemical compounds) that does not serve the initially envisioned good purposes. Overdose is bad, whether you use table salt, a medicine, or a law.

ARM in particular is not known for abuse of the system, so indeed they are a positive example.

I'm not sure why this is an example of positive use of IP law. I maybe agree that it's an example of IP law not being ridiculously abused (however I really don't have enough information). It might be positive to arm shareholders as well, but generally positive to society? You say that removing ip laws would harm legitimate business models, sure but having IP laws also harms legitimate business models, which ones would be more "legitimate" or "positive" is not straight forward to say.

Why is this being downvoted? I think it’s a good point. It seems like ARMs success is due in part to minimal fragmentation, which is due in turn to ARM’s licensing strategy.

Is it really the case that ARM is less fragmented than x86? Or, even if it is, x86 is wildly successful in the face of a rogue licensor spinning off an unofficial 64-bit extension to it's ISA.

how to downvote in Hacker news? There is no down vote button right?

After a certain upvote threshold on your account you get the ability to downvote

Oh ok thanks for letting me know.

Get 500 karma. I’m pretty sure that’s the level to unlock downvoting.

If it relies on Monopoly power, I have trouble regarding it as "legitimate".

"It makes me money" is not in and of itself a successful business model.

No, not “it makes me money” but “it succeeded to build an entire ecosystem of partners inheriting from a central producer of intelligence work, all of this succeeding to produce better output than the established player, Intel.” This is “good enough” as a measure of success, I don’t care where the money flows as long as an industry is being built. Actually that’s the sole role of money, which could be replaced by anything you like (point system, exchange, central planning). I’m just noting that IP protection enabled this industry, this time, despite me being generally against.

Is that not the literal definition of a successful business model?

>"This is an excellent example of positive use of IP law, and why removing copyright and patent would harm"

And there are countless counter-examples when IP law causes harm to consumers and inventors.

>"legitimate business models"

And what makes them legitimate? IP law is an artificial construct which currently serves select few. Why should not I be able to "invent" something and sell it without the worries just because somebody else happened to have the same idea? And many of the existing patents, especially ones in a software field can be "invented" by any reasonably intelligent Joe Doe in a few minutes if there is a need.