[AmericanChopper]

Just because the patent system has some problems doesn’t mean it doesn’t have any value. These troll patents might contain a high number of ideas you might just casually come up with, but the actually valuable ones tend to be comprised of innovative ideas that usually require significant R&D investment to come up with. Without patents there’s very little incentive to invest in coming up with those ideas. A lot of the time the people who come up with the patent have no intention or capability to bring products to market, so unless you want 100% of research to be completely controlled by commercial interests, you probably want to have patents.

You’re also ignoring what the patent is actually awarded for. The temporary monopoly is awarded in return for publicly disclosing your invention. Without patents you’d expect almost all commercial innovation to center around ideas that can be kept a trade secret, and to have a lot more budget devoted to protecting trade secrets. It would essentially be the exact opposite of what I expect you’d want to happen.

[crispyambulance]

  > The temporary monopoly is awarded in return for publicly disclosing your invention. 

Reading patents is perhaps one of the WORST and most inefficient ways to discover "new ideas". Even ignoring the turgid legal language, the actual central ideas of the patents are either so vague they're useless or they apply to utterly obsolete scenarios or they just poorly describe something that has already been in existence/usage before, during, and after the patent's existence.

We could do just fine WITHOUT the patent system. Maybe if instead of fretting about diligent Chinese copycats, the USA and its corporations actually built stuff instead of outsourcing everything, we would not need to worry so much about patent infringement.

[waterhouse]

Not to mention, it's my understanding that tech employees are generally instructed to avoid reading patents, because if the company ever gets found in court to have infringed on the patents, then them having read the patents will be used to show wilful infringement and therefore to award triple damages.

I suppose they could read expired patents, though.

[AmericanChopper]

You’re really just restating the claim that we don’t need intellectual property protections, without making any attempt to explain why.

Your suggestion that the global economy could shift towards an isolationist model is frankly enough to dismiss your idea without much further scrutiny.

[crispyambulance]

> ...suggestion that the global economy could shift towards an isolationist model...

Not at all. There's "global isolationism" and then there's outsourcing everything to the point where all that's left is the C-suite and a few supply-chain jockeys.

It doesn't have to be one extreme or the other.

[depressedpanda]

The key word here is 'invention'. In practice we have lawyers specialized in crafting as vague and broad patents as possible, so that bogus infringements can be litigated in court.

[AmericanChopper]

There’s lots of problems with our current system. However the list of problems doesn’t include the existence of the system itself.