I do not want to get into a debate on the morality of patents - there
is plenty of that in the Armchair archive. On the economics here are
some notes and references written for another purpose which may be of
interest.
Patents can *reduce* investment in RD in *theory* as well as in
The League for Programming Freedom has a dated bibliography relevant to software
patents:
http://lpf.ai.mit.edu/Links/prep.ai.mit.edu/index
Some of the more relevant entries include:
On the complex economics of patent scope
by Robert P. Merges and Richard R. Nelson
Columbia Law Review, May
