> From the viewpoint of a lowly engineer with a dozen patents or so, I don't think I would have been paid to do all that research if my employers saw less retur

> From the viewpoint of a lowly engineer with a dozen patents or so, I don't think I would have been paid to do all that research if my employers saw less returns for their investment. Well I've been paid most of my career to do (some pretty fundamental at times) R&D without having to patent the output, so I'm not sure that holds. Of course I'm likely in a different country to you, and mine has very explicit grants and tax benefits for R&D, but even when we were partnering with IBM we didn't patent the work I was doing (for a production homomorphic encryption implementation in 2014). So I dunno. There are other mechanisms that can arise that still get yourself a job and paid without stifling innovation the way patents currently can do today. The bigger problem is the flat time limit thats not adjusted per-industry. 20 years is a massive amount of time now today in 2024 in a lot of industries. Eons even.