India decided to ignore patents on certain medicines. Pharmaceutical companies were initially outraged, then when they realised they had hit an immovable object they freaked out and started offering their drugs at very low cost. They are still making innovative products, but they distorted their market power and millions of poor Indian citizen&#x27;s lives were immeasurably worse off for it.<p>Your final point about patent infringement... I dunno what to say. You&#x27;ve just explained why patents are inherently problematic, the patent system can&#x27;t handle it internally because then they would be handling financial lawsuits in a non-transparent matter, and the rule of law would be in essence damaged. By making the patent office the approvers AND handle objections - that&#x27;s not going to ever work. They&#x27;ll almost always agree with their own decision. After all, they made the wrong decision in the first place!<p>Patents occur within the legal framework. If the patent system is hard to improve, then those other issues you mention are, to my kind, not immeasurably greater than the utterly broken patent system we gave today.<p>I don&#x27;t feel the reality is as subtle as you talk about. I think it&#x27;s actually as clear as day that patents distort markets, and I don&#x27;t feel you&#x27;ve demonstrated that patents aren&#x27;t orthogonal to open source software, except where it comes to financial incentives.<p>Open Source financial incentives are to build the best software that the market wants, and sell the code with backing support contracts and early access to new features that are shown in the open, with guarantees that the best people are working on the software; yet still the same time allowing maximum competition and innovation in the market whilst each company or organization strives to produce the most attractive offering.<p>Patents attempt to produce a monopoly on an <i>idea</i> and prevent anyone else from capitalising on it for decades. It assumes that nobody will ever want to form an invention unless they have exclusive control over that idea. That&#x27;s self-contradictory - protecting a patent means that someone else WILL have that idea eventually and want to build a product around it, or even incorporate it into their product. They won&#x27;t be able to, except at great cost. This clearly and IS stifling innovation. The rise of patent trolls and defensive patents are just two examples of how utterly and fundamentally flawed the entire concept of patents are.