Patent systems are bad because they deal with concepts which are too vague. I don't think we can fix that. Lets leave aside economic implications for a moment.

Patent systems are bad because they deal with concepts which are too vague. I don't think we can fix that. Lets leave aside economic implications for a moment. What is an invention? Is it really different to a discovery. There is no good way to distinguish between invention and discovery because they're not distinct concepts. Distinctions are semantic, even in an archetypical example of patentable invention like Edison's lightbulb. Inventing a lightbulb is discovering that electricity can heat a filament, it emits light when hot and can be prevented from burning by placing it in a vacuum. These are exactly the types of problems the law chokes on.