Ideally people are researching and innovating because it's something they're passionate about and not doing it purely for financial gain. If that's your positi

Ideally people are researching and innovating because it's something they're passionate about and not doing it purely for financial gain. If that's your position then why not abolish patents? I'm a lot more in favour of that. Personally, I think the patent system discourages innovation and encourages rent-seeking. Andrew Yang also suggested making government rewards for technology development, so instead of a patent for some type of technology you get say $10,000,000 - or maybe even $1 billion if your tech meets whatever benchmarks spec'd. I like this idea at an instinctual level but I worry that it would be open to abuse. Perhaps the abuse of a system like that would be less bad than the patent system we have right now but that remains to be seen. I do know that a lot of people would be generally opposed to it on principle. They would see it as an undeserved handout.