[amy-petrik-214]

You will get startup types blatantly ripping you off and stealing your ideas, and it's smiled upon to fight back and shut them down, sure.

Conversely a person could start patenting obvious ideas (morse code + cell phone seems like one) and then thousands of people independently arrive at the idea unaware of prior work. So now all that legal paperwork backing meant to fight off the startup type, the dragon, is used on an innocent - he who fights dragons should be careful not to become a dragon himself

IMO the patent system here is transformed into a "first person who calls dibs is the winner!" type free for all, and we get professional dib-callers. And the reason why it happens is the content of the patent, the ideation, execution, is all rote simple and not all that innovative.