It is indeed. You are arguing that the secret sauce is in the baseband, and yes you can&#x27;t patent it if the competitive advantage is that it&#x27;s hard to make so long as it is secret. It&#x27;s novel, you don&#x27;t need to patent it to make money as copyright takes care of that... And so to complete the circle patents aren&#x27;t necessary, and don&#x27;t benefit society in the scenario you present!<p><i>edit:</i> you might bring up clean room engineering that AMD did in the 80s. Intel weren&#x27;t effected, and are bigger than ever. And the pace of innovation is <i>massive</i>.