There's no way to value the contribution or potential contribution of a technology to society, nor the damage done by granting a monopoly. Not by an eminent sci

There's no way to value the contribution or potential contribution of a technology to society, nor the damage done by granting a monopoly. Not by an eminent scientist or humanist, and certainly not by a clark in a patent office. You used the word repay - there's no way to be confident that a temporary monopoly will come within an order of magnitude of repayment. Further we need to consider the destructive side-effects of these flawed attempts at compensation. Patents create an environment that stifles innovation: consider the threat of being taken down for inadvertently doing something that has a monopoly has granted on discourages both innovation and communication. Imagine applying for a patent, publishing, and only through that process discovering that you were infringing an existing patent! You need to pay lawyers lots to protect against that. And many inventors couldn't even be bothered with applying for a patent even if it were easy - many are inventing technologies because they have a problem to solve, not because they're aiming to create something thaqt will milk repayment from society. The net beneficiaries of the patent system are business processes that are dedicated to playing that system. Given the choice between something very complicated, expensive and unreliable (patent system), and something simple, free and also unreliable (the default - absence of patents), I opt for the latter.