Patents are a great idea, and essential to technological progress. It's a bargain you make with the state: in return for publishing complete details on your ide

Patents are a great idea, and essential to technological progress. It's a bargain you make with the state: in return for publishing complete details on your idea, you get a twenty-year monopoly on use of the idea. You get value for your research, and the public gets full access to the idea after twenty years. Patents as currently implemented are a problem. Too many are granted for too-vague ideas; patent trolls buy those vague ideas and then milk them for rent; companies game the system to get far more than the specified twenty years of exclusivity. So, it's a mixed bag.