Most startups need to have barriers to entry if they are to have the capacity to sustain themselves beyond the initial phase of their existence.<p>This is one of the first questions that potential investors will ask any founding team: assuming that you initially succeed, what is to prevent big players from attacking you. More often than not, the answer lies in the IP protections that protect such a startup's development efforts, whether this takes the form of patents, copyrights, or whatever. It is true that such startups can also be prejudiced by threats of infringement from large companies and in this sense IP rights can potentially work against them. In my experience, though, for every oddball situation (easily less than 1%) in which IP rights threaten a startup, there are many, many situations where IP rights work in their favor and in which they would clearly be prejudiced if such rights were scaled back or eliminated.<p>Thus, from my subjective perspective, I can attest that IP rights <i>are</i> a spur to innovation because many of the startups I have represented would not have been able either to start or to fund themselves without a business model that ultimately depended on proprietary advantages afforded by IP rights. Perhaps they are wrong about what does or does not promote the best interests of their companies but, in the real world, this is overwhelmingly how most founders see IP in relation to their companies.<p>Can't speak to the broader societal or cost/benefit issues raised by the author (and would agree that patents in particular are in need of reform). By the way, as I do not do patent filings, this is not a livelihood issue for me - just my viewpoint as a lawyer representing startups for over a quarter century in Silicon Valley.