The existence of patents also was meant to create an industry for selling ideas rather than physical goods. How often are people really inventing novel things,

The existence of patents also was meant to create an industry for selling ideas rather than physical goods. How often are people really inventing novel things, patenting them, and then licensing them out to other parties or selling the rights? By far the most applied use case of patents is to fabricate or buy bullshit IP to sue anyone even remotely close to your product or service into bankruptcy. In some ways, yes, patents have created jobs. Except the job is not to be innovative or discover new things, but to manipulate and optimize your language in a patent filing to cover as much existing IP as possible that you can then harass with your patents. It is only most obvious with software patents because of how insane it is to restrict math like that. The question always has to be do the benefits outweigh the costs. Are the few and far between actively able to use the patent system as a means to come up with legitimately novel inventions worth all the innovation lost to corporations using patents as weapons to shut down competition and prevent innovation.