I know less than little about most things, but wouldnt that m ake search engienes compete more, giving us, the users, better results?
I think there's a fine line where on one side inventors cant net a profit without a time-based monopoly but on the other side of this fine line it's just hurting competition.
Sort of. The average search results would have gotten a little better, but only because Excite/Altavista/etc would have poached some key early employees of Google and walked away with their algorithm, which was Googles key advantage back then. So the big incumbents would be able to use PageRank AND their pre-existing market share to destroy google easily. The huge leap forward in search (and it was a huge leap) would have never happened, because their would be no challengers who could match the purchasing power and market share of incumbents
I think there's a fine line where on one side inventors cant net a profit without a time-based monopoly but on the other side of this fine line it's just hurting competition.