Almost No Patented Discoveries Get Used
This speaks to the patent system being so far perverted from its original purpose that I feel it's time to seriously begin considering if we want to support it in any form. Are patents in 2015 being used more for "promoting the useful arts"[1] or more as a weapon for large enterprises to use against their large and small competition?This same broken-ness applies to another system of legal monopolies too: copyrights. Are those used more to "promote the useful arts" in 2015, or are they used more by rightsholders to stamp out that which they don't like?I wonder what our economic, artistic, and technological landscape would look like if we decided, as a society, that these legal monopolies are causing more harm than good, and that they should be severely curtailed, if not outright abolished? I wonder if it would really be as bad as the people who have a financial interest in these things say it would be?[1]: http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?collId=llsl&fileName=00...(interestingly, the copyright laws use the same "useful arts" wording almost verbatim)