[sooheon]

There are solid economic arguments that they were never the right model, even "back in The Day": http://www.dklevine.com/general/intellectual/againstfinal.ht...

Patents are government granted monopolies on ideas. The case for them is that you need the carrot of a monopoly to incentivize innovators (empirically untrue). The case against them is that government mandated monopolies immediately dampen all subsequent innovation until expiry (empirically true across industries throughout history).

[Nopoint2]

How about the delayed electrification in Britain? It seems that elswhere it began in the late 1870s, but there was no major electrification in Britain before the 20th century. I thought maybe it was also because of some patent obstruction?