There's obviously a balance to be made with incentivizing inventing though. Some inventions are expensive and nobody would do them without patent protection. So

There's obviously a balance to be made with incentivizing inventing though. Some inventions are expensive and nobody would do them without patent protection. Some are trivial though and it's those that are a problem. That is quite an assumption, especially in assuming that the only way for governments to incentivize the development of technology is to give someone exclusive monopolies on those inventions. We could give them grants, reward money, whatever. There are other ways to incentivize invention without tramping on companies and inventors' abilities to build upon the work of each other. Not to mention that the development of 3D printers take hardware, which is quite expensive.