Great questions, Denny. Here is one more. So you invest tons blood, sweat, and tears developing a type of cell phone, writing a research paper, figuring out how a combination of elements might zap malaria; how do you recover from your efforts if folks back engineer your product out of their need to know how things work, and share their findings with their friends? If capitalism is to be furthered as a result of the product development (phone, article, medicine), should some capital benefit accrue somewhere? -- should it not accrue to the developer of the product? Or maybe not. Maybe if all patents and copyrights disappeared overnight, people would still invest millions in developing new powerful products.
As an aside, what are new "powerful products", those that need to be used by businesses (Microsoft Office) because thanks to advertising they are the common language? Or those that actually do amazing things (Quattro Pro/WordPerfect). Regarding Ubuntu/Linux, I have them in one of my laptops, but, well maybe I am still learning, but I do not use that laptop for my business.
Marcy