Patents were created because we believe that there’s a win-win to providing limited term protection for new inventions. There are fields, like IC design, where lack of IP protection would halt innovation pretty quickly - nobody is going to invest tens or hundreds of millions to build a new chip if a competitor can copy it in a matter of months.

That said, it’s a bargain made for the public good, and we should always keep that in mind. It’s pretty clear that there are abuses of the patent system, we need to think about how we can modify it to minimize those abuses while protecting valuable research.

There might still be uses... But I would say granting of patents should be conditioned on the good they do society.

And limited in timed based on the investment made.

Still, it's tempting to think patents should only be permitted in certain areas...