Rent-seeking is when profits massively outstrip investment. Perhaps infeasible in practice, but if government protection of licenses (patents, even copyright) c

Rent-seeking is when profits massively outstrip investment. Perhaps infeasible in practice, but if government protection of licenses (patents, even copyright) could be capped at a maximum that's proportional to money & time invested, rent-seeking could become less of a problem. As in, allow entities to make a handsome profit, far outstripping their original investment. Just don't allow them to profit off of it forever. Patent and copyright expirations are a proxy for this, but they don't take into account the actual money & time invested, instead they replace them with a hard-coded magic number which will work for some products and fail for others.