Patents are ideas... if you can think of it... so can someone else.
Patents were intended to protect someone's investment into an idea. Today, they just serve as cash cows.
With no patents, a company would be forced to continuously innovate and stay ahead of the curve -- which would replace their patent warchest with a warchest of talented individuals and innovators instead.
Clearly the system is broken to the point that people patent anything just so they can sue others who meet the general ideology of the patent. Clearly this is not what the spirit of patenting was designed for. A system overhaul is more appropriate than to rid all patents.
What is your evidence for this statement?
It's childish to believe that patents are not necessary?
Also, highly impractical.
The entire idea of capitalism is to have fierce competition between companies -- patents, by design, allow one company to innovate once, then nobody else can make something similar. That seems, very anti-competitive (and open for abuse as evidenced by today's "patent wars").
If nobody could "squat" on an idea, then instead of innovating once, you would have to continuously innovate to stay in the lead of your industry.
If you need to pay billions of research cost for something that can be immediately copied, you simply don't do the research. There's plenty of cheap more or less useless improvements instead.
We already see that in medicine, where R&D has become so ludicrously expensive for many actually needed drugs that people would rather create a new ED pill.
Capitalism & "free markets" (as if!) fail as a motor of progress, per se. The only thing they're good at is extraction of wealth. That's why we have government regulation in the first place - to direct the efficiencies created by the market place.
How did they get that way? Because of the patent system.
Just look at the PC industry, where the technology is all open and commoditized. Acer, Lenovo, Asus, etc, own the market, nobody makes any real money, and nobody tries to innovate because new designs are easily copied and margins are razor-thin.
The fleet-footed companies you talk about, generate at best, lead compounds. Turning those leads to INDs (investigational new drugs) and then actual "medicine" is totally controlled by the FDA and is a multi-year, multi-million dollar endeavor, that is well beyond the ken of the fleet-footed operators. Many of these drug candidates fail late in the game, after 5-10 years of human trials, sinking the investment of time and effort with them. Meanwhile the patent clock is running and a drug that hits the market has far less than the 20 year patent term to recoup the costs and generate revenue to discover and groom the next life saving drug.
Speaking from personal experience here.
Unpatented drugs can be done. (I'm trying fwiw)
Later, SuperMegaCo will submit a marginally different formulation of the same basic thing, and it'll get approved because they're probably going to win any long expensive court-battles.
1. Make patent applications free of cost, so anyone can play unless they start clogging up the system.
2. Applicants must wait 2^n days between applications, where n is the applicant's number of rejected applications within the past 1,000 years. Non-human persons must be at least 1 year old before applying.
3. Examiners are paid approximately the nation's median income, but also receive rights to 1% of license fees for patents they approve. If an approved patent is ever overturned in court, the examiner is fired and loses all future royalties for any other patents they approved. Those royalties then go to the patent office. Budget surpluses go toward scientific research or maybe education grants.
4. Patents assigned to biological human inventors expire after 20 years. Others expire after 5 years.