As a child I learned that technological progress takes the form of inventions and comes from intellectual heroes called inventors. Manufacture, distribution, marketing, business, etc. were all just details that would inevitably get worked out by one or another of the sharks in that grubby game. And the sharks would constantly be trying to screw the inventor out of his due. As a child I would have looked at someone who enforces patents for a living as a kind of hero.

Once I reached the tech industry it was a total 180, ideas are worthless, the heroes are the engineers who can scale them and the founders who can make businesses out of them. But patent law didn’t get the memo, it’s still based on my elementary-school worldview.