You could view patent collector to have roughly the same role as debt collector: it's a specialization of enforcement for certain type of social contracts in ou

You could view patent collector to have roughly the same role as debt collector: it's a specialization of enforcement for certain type of social contracts in our system. In programming term, they would be an abstraction black box the free others (creator) from doing mundane unnecessary jobs. Now, of course the current implementation of IP is pretty shitty. And there are argument to be made that the assumption of "no patent/ idea protection === no incentive for people to create thing" is flawed to start with.