[marcinzm]

Which you mitigate by keeping an eye on competitors and avoiding overly saturated market spaces. This in turn incentives a broader research focus and also incentives publishing paper in saturated areas to make sure there's documented prior art. There's also an incentive for multiple smaller inventions spread over time. This all seems like a positive and not a negative for society as a whole.

[fauigerzigerk]

I think it can be a positive as long as the threshold for what counts as an invention is high enough. If the threshold is too low then patents become an instrument for harassment and rent seeking, slowing down industrial progress.

We have to find the right balance. If a large number of patents sound like a sad joke to most professionals in a field, then something has gone very wrong.

[kiba]

We have to find the right balance. If a large number of patents sound like a sad joke to most professionals in a field, then something has gone very wrong.

That presume that we have the ability to finetune patent laws as needed and also presume that world changing inventions are necessarily novel enough to professionals in a given field. It has often happened commonly enough that inventions will occur to several innovators at once as the next step. It is questionable that it would be fair to penalize an inventor just because another was first to file a patent, potentially driving these inventors out of the industry.

It is also pushing against the reality that people are always building on the works of others. Patents are by themselves monopolies. That is how they work. Thus, people had resorted to arrangements to avoid constant patent lawsuits, which had happened in the past.