Let me ask you, as a rational, profit-seeking individual or organization looking to secure revenue from your new invention in a patent-free society. Do you:
a. Volunteer the details of your invention to your competitors?
b. Keep these details secret?
Moreover, what would it take to get you to choose option a?
c. Appear to volunteer the details, but obfuscate them so deeply in patentese that nobody can ever tease them out, but I still get to sue my competitors.
How is that a strawman? He said that patents were introduced to allow ideas to be disseminated. That's a faulty premise.
However, to handle your own strawman, the answer is b. I'd keep the details secret. Which is not a problem, because there have been many, many occassions when someone reverse engineers the work or comes up with the idea completely independently.
Let me ask you, as a rational, profit-seeking individual or organization looking to secure revenue from your new invention in a patent-free society. Do you:
a. Volunteer the details of your invention to your competitors?
b. Keep these details secret?
Moreover, what would it take to get you to choose option a?