I'm looking at actual data. You are speaking from hearsay and anecdotes. Here's a paper to get started with. It is a review of dozens of papers most of which have empirical results:
Your example is not concrete. What you think of as "radioactive" could simply be researchers concluding that specific area was not worth exploring anymore. Here's how you can give a concrete example: Those patents have expired. Can you point to any new fundamentally significant compression technology that has since emerged that could have been thought of as being previously held back by those patents?
Now I can give a concrete example of how those very same patents caused innovation: When they sued people over lzw in gifs, that prompted people to develop alternate methods like PNG. Sounds like progress to me. Was it forced innovation? Sure! But that's always been one of the rationalizations of patents. People often don't innovate unless forced to.
>My impression is based on decades of work in the industry.
So let's get even more anecdotal: how often have you been unable to "advance the arts" due to a patent?
> How many land mines ever explode?
How many good ideas get ripped off with their creator getting nothing in return? If we want to be hyperbolic, I could just say "anti-patent people are just intellectual thieves, nothing more, nothing less"?
http://eml.berkeley.edu//~bhhall/papers/HallHarhoff12_NBER_w...
Your example is not concrete. What you think of as "radioactive" could simply be researchers concluding that specific area was not worth exploring anymore. Here's how you can give a concrete example: Those patents have expired. Can you point to any new fundamentally significant compression technology that has since emerged that could have been thought of as being previously held back by those patents?
Now I can give a concrete example of how those very same patents caused innovation: When they sued people over lzw in gifs, that prompted people to develop alternate methods like PNG. Sounds like progress to me. Was it forced innovation? Sure! But that's always been one of the rationalizations of patents. People often don't innovate unless forced to.
>My impression is based on decades of work in the industry.
So let's get even more anecdotal: how often have you been unable to "advance the arts" due to a patent?
> How many land mines ever explode?
How many good ideas get ripped off with their creator getting nothing in return? If we want to be hyperbolic, I could just say "anti-patent people are just intellectual thieves, nothing more, nothing less"?