The solution to this is supposed to be the time limit: if your invention builds on a very recent invention, you may have to get permission from that inventor, but older inventions become common property and can be freely built upon. If that time limit gets too long, which it absolutely has, then that can end up causing more harm than good.

I disagree, patents makes sense for normal citizens, it gives them a legal framework to fight against a company just taking the invention from them without compensation.

As for the 99% vs 1% contribution, remember that it is usually the last 1% of a project that consumes the most time.

I “take” your idea and execute it better than you, there shouldn’t be legislation stopping me

THANK YOU. Exactly. Competition is supposed to decide who wins, not the state. If your invention is genuinely great, you should dominate because you innovate faster, manufacture better, support customers better, reduce costs better, and improve continuously, not because the government threatens competitors for 20 years.

Imagine you are an inventor and come up with a brilliant new thing, and start a business to sell it. You even bring in people to help manufacture and make them a co-op. Doing everything ethically right. Selling a quality product that people want.

Then a multinational conglomerate sees it is selling well and they use their immense resources to scale up production, produce and sell it for half the price you can.

You and your co-op go out of business and megacorps shareholders pocket even more dividends.

Thats why patents should exist in a capitalist hellscape.

Because it is not really the idea specifically that you patent, you patent a method of making an idea work.

If you write a book and pour your heart and soul into it, then you self-publish and it catches on, and some douchebag dropshipper republished it on CreateSpace and sells it on Amazon with Print-on-Demand, and sells a million copies while your sales of your own book drop off to nothing, you'd be upset, wouldn't you? Don't you think you deserve at least some legal protection?

When an idea becomes a part of humanity's shared intellectual heritage, it shouldn't be owned by anyone. Books take 90 years to enter the public domain, so generally the authors are dead by then. But nobody can patent "gears," "screws," or "levers" as concepts, because they've simply been around so long.

But if someone draws a specific schematic with precise dimensions, and arrays them in a specific way to achieve a result, then that's a unique invention that they should have the rights to for maybe 5-10 years.

It should be loose enough that someone else can draw a different schematic inspired by that one that achieves something similar, but not simply copy-pasting the same schematic.

The fact that the rich get away with intellectual property theft while hounding the poor for anything close to a trademark violation is an injustice and a symptom of financial oligarchy, but that's less to do with IP laws per se and more to do with governments skewing everything in favor of the rich.

Without patent protection it would be impossible to bring anything new on the market unless you were allready one of the big companies.

Expertise, brand, speed, know-how, first-mover position, customer trust etc. are wothless if multinational mega conglomerate can just copy your homework and use their wealth to quickly massproduce your thing and spread it to every market of the world.