What is flawed is the state of the affairs in the patent mechanism, not the premise of the patents in principle. I am against the issues resulting from frivolo

What is flawed is the state of the affairs in the patent mechanism, not the premise of the patents in principle. I am against the issues resulting from frivolous patents too. Unfortunately, in my opinion, most people against patents do not reason about their philosophy making it harder to convince the authorities against patents. My understanding is that before patents, people and companies would invent but keep their invention a trade secret for as long as they can, which meant they had exclusivity to the invention. Patents allow such exclusivity for a limited period of time in exchange of disclosing the invention and losing rights over it after a specified period. The patents applicability criterion correspondingly includes non-obviousness which is to judge if someone else could come up with the same invention without investing significant time and effort or not. Majority of the ideas are "supposed to be" ruled out by this criterion. The state of the affairs however is that most obvious of the things get patented because (1) obviousness is unmeasurable, and (2) searching the prior art fully is impractical. Short message: You cannot call all swans white simply because most you see are white.