My point was when wealth protection is a tool to bolster innovation, then the incentives are aligned correctly.  When people, or more importantly legislators, forget that and think the <i>purpose</i> of patents is to reward for innovation, we get some perverse incentives.  In a perfect world, protection would be inversely proportional to the amount of innovation the sector is experiencing, and would also be scaled to the amount the innovation helps.  But those are both hard to measure realistically.