Without any concept of authorship, moral rights and prior art we would go back to early 1900: a lot of technology was not only secret but even actively obfuscated.
Companies would be secretive and uncooperative and society progresses much more slowly.
Patents prevent small, underfunded inventors from creating. It makes access to innovation exclusively for the rich, who have access to the resources necessary to patent new ideas, defend their patent, and squash small innovators. It also forces underfunded innovators to seek financing and relinquish significant IP rights to a viralistic parasite providing funding.
They are a tool of control against the intellectual class, and a method to slow innovation in order to parasitic entities to maximize profits. Rarely do patents in the modern day protect small time inventors. Instead, it entrenches large scale institutions and enslaves the minds generating the intellectual property.
Simultaneously, with millions of brilliant minds around the globe, it gives the rich tools to squash inventors generating simple concepts in parallel. So many simple ideas — like much of 3d printing, or shadow extrusions, or using ML to read road signs — have been patented to the detriment of all.
I could go on all day. Patents are a plague.
I'm not sure why you are replying to me. I never said I like how patents and copyright are implemented in the current time.
> I could go on all day.
I can see that...
We live in very different times.
This is exactly the state of things today. It always takes significant time for a new technology area to open up and improve in transparency, and it's not at all clear that copyright and patents can really improve on this.
Citation needed.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/against-intellectual-mo...