It's not perfectly adequate. E.g. ARM can't let Samsung see the design until Samsung signs a contract. It makes it difficult to shop the design around. Also, a contract that provided the protections similar to a patent would be an ad-hoc informally specified version of patent law, and we'd replace patent litigation with more contract litigation.
It also provides no recourse against third parties. What if someone reverse engineers the design from one of Samsung's products? This is not theoretical--there's a major Chinese networking company that used to copy the designs of a major US networking company down to the silk screening. It also prevents ARM from publishing details in trade journals and forces them to keep documentation and designs under lock and key. It makes industrial espionage tremendously more valuable. Sub licensing, transferability, etc, become a huge hassle.
And to what benefit? Consider one suit wildly maligned on these boards: Oracle v Google. Without copyright, that lawsuit still would have happened more or less along the same lines, except it would be about whether Google violated its contract with Sun about how Google was allowed to use Sun's code. And t would have been longer and more expensive because the parties couldn't speak the common language of copyright law.
With the important difference that a truly independent reimplementation is not covered.
It also provides no recourse against third parties. What if someone reverse engineers the design from one of Samsung's products? This is not theoretical--there's a major Chinese networking company that used to copy the designs of a major US networking company down to the silk screening. It also prevents ARM from publishing details in trade journals and forces them to keep documentation and designs under lock and key. It makes industrial espionage tremendously more valuable. Sub licensing, transferability, etc, become a huge hassle.
Is this US networking company you speak of still profitable? Looks like ARM are fairly heavy-handed with defending their designs at the moment, so you'll forgive me being skeptical of patents encouraging the sharing of IP: http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4042770/Student-s-AR...
It also provides no recourse against third parties. What if someone reverse engineers the design from one of Samsung's products? This is not theoretical--there's a major Chinese networking company that used to copy the designs of a major US networking company down to the silk screening. It also prevents ARM from publishing details in trade journals and forces them to keep documentation and designs under lock and key. It makes industrial espionage tremendously more valuable. Sub licensing, transferability, etc, become a huge hassle.
And to what benefit? Consider one suit wildly maligned on these boards: Oracle v Google. Without copyright, that lawsuit still would have happened more or less along the same lines, except it would be about whether Google violated its contract with Sun about how Google was allowed to use Sun's code. And t would have been longer and more expensive because the parties couldn't speak the common language of copyright law.