If you place the USA as innovation leaders in the modern world, you make it very difficult to present an example under similar conditions. You can go back in History, though. Countries involved in world discovery in the 1400-1600 were absolute innovation leaders and required no patent law.
They didn't need patent law, because they had princes and armies. The also had a culture in which information couldn't travel faster than a man (usually a man...) on a horse, and patentable information could only be understood by a few hundred individuals in each country, at most.
One of the points of patent law is to distribute the rewards of invention, so individual inventors - not corporations - benefit from their creativity.
Patent protections aren't the only element in this, but they're one element, and a lot of 20th century products would never have appeared otherwise.
It's simply not historical to argue otherwise.
The 21st century works differently, but with the irony that the FOSS people claim their way is absolutely correct, and no other system is workable.
Sharing certainly works if you have a day job that pays your bills. But innovation is not invention. Patents were originally designed for creative inventors, not commercial packaging operations like [insert corporate giant here], or freeware mash-up/YetAnotherFramework projects.
In the US at least, the system has become a joke. But just because it's broken doesn't mean that inventors shouldn't be rewarded and protected somehow.
