It's more of an optimisation problem. You want inventors to invent a lot of things, so you give them patents. But if you give them too long a patent, they will

It's more of an optimisation problem. You want inventors to invent a lot of things, so you give them patents. But if you give them too long a patent, they will just invent a few things, then sit on the IP. Nowadays, there should really be ~5 year hardware patents, and ~1 year software patents, which mostly reflects the time-to-market after invention.