No fantasy necessary. In any version of capitalism government enforced monopoly for an idea and implementation is basically not capitalism whether it is fantastical or practical. Most modern democracies have not had any version of capitalism for a long time. The US economic system is more socialist than anything else really.
I also was not arguing for replacing one system with another since that never works out. The new thing ends up being as bad as the old thing but slightly different. I'm arguing for more stringent requirements for patents and higher bars for suing someone based on patent infringement claims. That already goes a long way towards preventing patent abuse.
> shareholders don't put up that kind of money without expecting to get it back.
Therein lies the problem and what I mean by "short term business thinking". MIPS investors could have settled for getting back much less money for their investment but instead they chose the greedy approach and we collectively ended up worse off.
That said, I'm actually fine with a higher bar for patents.
> MIPS investors could have settled for getting back much less money for their investment but instead they chose the greedy approach and we collectively ended up worse off.
Could you show your math here? I can't find any evidence that MIPS in this incarnation actually returned money to investors. When SGI spun it out, it looks like its market cap was somewhere north of $300m. Eventually it was bought for $100m. I can't find any record of a dividend in between.
I also am not sure you understand how venture capital works. As an asset class, VC doesn't do much better than other investments. The absurdly great hits (e.g., Google) pay for the 80% of companies that don't make it. Without taking the very big payouts on the few successes, it's not clear to me who would put money into VC funds. A lot of their money comes from pension funds, school endowments and the like; those people have long-term obligations to meet. So how do you propose to maintain significant levels of venture funding if it returns "much less money" than it does now?
In that case the whole thing is even sadder. If the venture was doomed from the start they didn't need to bring down everyone else with them.
You seem to think there needs to be a solution to this that somehow maintains the status quo of VC funded ventures. I personally don't. You're welcome to come up with a solution. I'm not the one to brainstorm it with.
Do you understand that Lexra only existed because they were drafting off of work done by MIPS? Without MIPS, there would have been no Lexra to bring down. Both companies only existed because of venture funding and patents.
And MIPS of course wasn't "doomed from the start". The nature of investment is that there are no sure things. Many good bets don't pay off.
I don't particularly care about VC. I care a lot about investment in technological innovation. Your initial claim was that "we'd be much further along" without patents and greed. I'm saying that I don't think that's the case, because patents and greed are two parts of the mechanism by which we move further along.
If you have an alternative that will actually get us "further along", I'm all ears. Feel free to tell us how you'd achieve similar or greater levels of funding in a better world, preferably with some actual numbers. But without that, it sounds like you're just carping.
I also was not arguing for replacing one system with another since that never works out. The new thing ends up being as bad as the old thing but slightly different. I'm arguing for more stringent requirements for patents and higher bars for suing someone based on patent infringement claims. That already goes a long way towards preventing patent abuse.
> shareholders don't put up that kind of money without expecting to get it back.
Therein lies the problem and what I mean by "short term business thinking". MIPS investors could have settled for getting back much less money for their investment but instead they chose the greedy approach and we collectively ended up worse off.