with this logic (and if it would have always applied) we would have 1 restaurant chain in the whole world, 1 car maker in the whole world, hey we would have only one merchant in the whole world - and worst of all - only one OS maker in the whole world.
the business model of a merchant is to buy something cheap and sell it at a more expensive price. if this business model would be copyrightable than nobody else would be allowed (not until he/she licensed it) to buy something cheap and sell it at a more expensive price.
the one merchant who invented this concept would then be the only merchant in the world, and as the other guy who invented "licensing" would probably not have "licensed" licensing to the merchant (as the merchant would then have a license on licensing and would have just licensed licensing to other people) the merchant would be forever the only merchant in the world.
note: yeah i know this is absurd, but not as absurd as the notion, that business models are copyrightable. (or should not get copied because of .... whatever)
If there were no protections, anyone that had lots of resources could just cherry-pick new technology and ideas (use the companies as almost free R&D) and beat them to the market before any small company even has a chance to get off the ground.
And yet, in the 1980s and early 1990s, when there was absolutely no patent protection for software, the software industry flourished.
And yet, Google, a small upstart, was able to rise well above all the other search engines, despite being (at the beginning) much less funded, and using an algorithm that -- while patented by them in 95 or so -- had been known for 40 years, and even used in exactly the same way with respect to academic references (who have, for all intents and purposes, "links" in the printed paper world).
So, even though everyone who had a lot of resources could do that, it doesn't happen in practice - and in fact, the existing patent regime seems to be useless in this regard.
Patents and copyrights are a very nice idea, but the existing implementations are so horrible, that it is not clear to me we're better off than without them.
