I'm sorry but this is just not true. You say the kind of people who deserve a patent would do the work either way and then you suggest a handful of people. Many, many people have created things for the purpose of making money. Your world would eliminate people like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. Later in life, when Jobs had billions, he didn't seem to care about money anymore but in the beginning Apple tried everything. They even had a clothing line.

As for your examples, Linus didn't invent. He made a version of an existing OS and started with an existing version of a copy of that OS. He did it for fun, but one must also recognize that he's gained a tremendous amount by this seemingly "benevolent" action. Fresh out of college he could take much more interesting jobs than most people with his background could. His "gift" ended up being a loss leader for his career.

So if we were reliant on only having people like Tesla to push us forward we'd be nowhere near where we are today. Tesla was brilliant but there are just far too few people who think and work as he did.

Tesla was one in a million. For your ideas to work you would need to teach the entire 7 billion strong population of humans that we need to peacefully work together as a species. I'm sure you'll be met with great success. Until that day it is necessary to protect rights in a manner that lets people know they can do great things and not have to worry that someone will steal their years of hard work.

I don't agree with people filing this lawsuit. I don't think their idea is all that novel. I also think patents shouldn't last longer then it takes to recoup the investment.

TL;DR = People don't work that way, but yeah the patent system is currently ridiculous.

jeremyrussell: "People don't work that way" is question-begging (if you don't know what that logical fallacy is please see Wikipedia).

The point is that they ought to work that way. People can and should change. Answering "well they don't work that way" as an argument against this is fallacious. I mean, take your argument and apply it to (say) cannibals. A cannibalistic tribe would say "well, we eat people, we've always eaten people, therefore things will never change."

There can't be a logical, rational argument for patents. Which is unsurprising, since patents are clearly barbaric. So barbarians defend patents using (surprise) barbaric illogic.