Don't be so dramatic. By and large what patents prevent is copying: taking someone's ideas and passing them off as your own. Most people consider this immoral too. Restrictions on unfair competition are literally hundreds of years old--it's not a recent invention.

E.g. one of Samsung's biggest problems in the recent patent dispute with Apple was that they were clearly blatantly copying Apple's designs.

>Most people consider this immoral too.

Morality is relative and totally arbitrary (and also influenced by the regime). Let's leave it out of the discussion.

>taking someone's ideas and passing them off as your own.

Everybody knows that we stand on the shoulders of giants. Claiming ownership of most ideas flies in the face of historical fact. Patents try to reconcile this with prior art and tests of non-obviousness but these are often subjective and highly flawed.

> taking someone's ideas and passing them off as your own.

It's incredible stupid that I can get sued for sitting down and working through a problem to a logical end just because someone, somewhere sat down and worked through the same logical steps. Physical inventions and chemical engineering make more sense but software patents...you're trying to patent a logical progression of ideas how does that make any sense at all?

There are other ways than patents to get rewards for your work, but patents are a non-starter in principle. Just because you thought of something first does not give you a right to stop someone else from thinking of it second. It's really very simple.

By and large, patents aren't intended for situations where it's likely that two people would think of the same design within the patent term. It's designed to address the situation where I spend time and money researching something, and someone else comes along and takes the results of that research and sells a competing product, undercutting me on price because he never had to invest that time or money.

How the system is intended to work is very different from how it actually works.

The path to hell is paved with "good" intentions. People have a responsibility of thinking through the consequences of their "good intentions."