Consider this: if you knew of 3 companies making the same new drug, who would you trust more? The company who spent years in clinical trials, showing you that their ingredients is safe, or the 2 companies who attempted to copy said drug through reverse engineering it — possibly incorporating something unsafe? The same is true with any “invention” that isn’t patented — you decide what product you need based on the cost and the safety. Sometimes the less expensive product is less safe or less effective, something that isn’t the case.

And regarding technology in the first place, is an interesting question raised at TechDirt:

If it was so expensive to develop the multi-touch technology (which isn’t new at all and similar technology has been demonstrated publicly in the past), then how would those other companies be able to just copy it? If it’s so easy to copy, then it shouldn’t have cost that much to develop.

There’s a study online somewhere by F.M. Scherer on the link between patents and innovation. He found that some 80% or more of product and process innovations would have been made without patents, with competitiveness alone a sufficient motive.

The one exception he found was drugs–because of the supposed high cost–but I doubt that. Most of the actual costs of development come from gaming the patent system. Simply safety-testing a single chemical formula that optimally targets the therapeutic window would require only a fraction of total drug R&D spending. The added cost comes from doing enough research on related formulas to secure patent lockdown on the entire family of compounds. And patents also skew a large amount of R&D into the development of “me, too” versions of drugs whose patents are about to expire.