I don't think it's really an apt analogy. It's an extraordinary situation where companies are, first and foremost, fighting to save their own lives and opening up their own economies. It's an emergency, where long-term profit maximization can easily be shunted off to the side.<p>That makes a kind of limited, temporary utopia. I don't know what the world would look like if you eliminated patents, but it wouldn't look like that.<p>It would probably be a better world than the one we live in, because technology has changed since the notion of patents was developed. But it wouldn't automatically consist of a whole bunch of happily cooperating companies and plentiful profits because of absolute necessity.