I suppose the following deserves downvotes in the HN context, but man, I'm just fucking tired of all this BS. Patents are granted, ultimately, by "the people"

I suppose the following deserves downvotes in the HN context, but man, I'm just fucking tired of all this BS. Patents are granted, ultimately, by "the people" (U.S. context, at least) to promote productive activity. At this point, "the people" should rise up and tell this army of lawyers and designers that, ok, you can't have your patents anymore. (Now go do something useful.) Reality is that property, including IP, is a social contract, not some divine absolute. -- Star Trek... (whatever number the movies are up to). The team comes back from the future, to invalidate countless destructive patents by presenting a "pad" mockup from the set of "The Next Generation". Counter-point: They are promptly stripped of their "future-ware" by lawyers (and the DOJ, of course, who does the actual stripping in full battle armor) who point out that there's now a patent on "pants having two legs " that will most certainly be extended ad infinitum into their timeframe. Side plot: What happened to the whales' residuals?