The sole function of a patent is to restrict innovation. That’s the only direct result of patents. All other claims about encouraging innovation rely on beliefs about secondary and tertiary effects which I believe are incomplete, out of date, and often simply incorrect.

Edit: Even the pure capitalists don’t like it: https://youtu.be/hoSWC_6mDCk

it's hard to say how enforcing against counterfeiting would work without something that looked like trademark law.

The other issue with patents is that the whole underlying idea is questionable. You're supposed to give people access to your idea in return for protection. But what is the value of that access? In a lot of areas, the value is zero, since reverse-engineering (or just looking at something) will give you all the information contained in the patent.

I suspect that most patents are giving companies a long-term monopoly on an idea, and providing absolutely no, or close to no value in return.

There have been patents that are the result of hard work, but there is a deluge of patents that contain only ideas that are so obvious that nobody was shameless enough to attempt to patent them before.

Moreover the majority of patents contain extraordinarily broad claims, which cover many things that the authors of the patent have never succeeded to make, but they include the claims in the patent with the hope that someone else will find a way to make those things and then they will reveal the patent and blackmail those who have actually made a real device.

In the old times, for a patent to be granted there was a condition to present a working prototype embodying the claims of the patent.

Unfortunately this condition has gone a long time ago, otherwise it would have filtered most ridiculous patent claims.

The whole story about wanting to incentivize companies to share their secrets doesn't even make sense. If we want the body of public knowledge to grow, don't legally protect secrets. Make non-competes illegal and make NDAs have a short maximum time limit, and you won't need to do anything special for knowledge to proliferate. The nerds that actually make things tend to like talking about how it works.

Personally, I think copyright isn't so bad simply because of what it covers.

A patent can stop me making stainless steel razor blades. At all.

But copyright? I can write a story about a boy wizard going to wizard school and learning from a man with a long white beard and a robe with huge sleeves. The law just says I can't call him Harry Potter.