Patents - Good or Bad

In 1851, an editorial in The Economist argued that the granting of patents: 

inflames cupidity, excites fraud, stimulates men to run after schemes ... begets disputes and quarrels betwixt inventors, provokes endless lawsuits [and] makes men ruin themselves for the sake of getting the privilege of a patent.

The editorial sought the end of patents.  

A prominent law professor in the field recently said (June 2, 2015), albeit with an eye toward a balanced approach to patent laws: 

The fact that the law encourages inventors to file first and figure out later how (or even if) the invention works for its intended purpose is unfortunate. It produces underdeveloped patent applications that do not communicate useful information to the world. It facilitates the rise of patent trolls who obtain patents but never bother to produce a product, instead making a business of suing those who do.

And it pushes people to patent things just in case, adding more patents into a system already overburdened with them.

Grim fortunes for the patent system. Nevertheless, the problems are not likely solved with doing away with the entire system, unless we conclude that the world would be better off without the patent system. Can we say that? Empirical evidence may suggest serious costs, but evidence on pharmaceutical and chemical patents suggests a great value does exist in at least some parts of the patent world. 

Silicon Valley businesses, by and large, disfavor patents because they present a substantial tax on innovative business ideas that are incredibly helpful. 

Pharmaceutical and medical companies are just as vociferous in their need to maintain the patent system because it takes billions in research and FDA processes (especially the arduous clinical trials process), to find a single new drug worth the investment.

This conflict is not a new debate. Patents do spur invention to a certain degree, and patents do create a costly right to exclude others. In some cases that costly right is burdensome because the rights cannot be understood. As Professors bessen and Meurer argue, if you can’t tell the boundaries, it ain’t property. [See Bessen and Meurer, Patent Failure].

To thread the needle, one idea is to award different time limits for different fields. For example, keep the 20-year time for pharmaceuticals requiring large investment, but shorten the time for business methods, or software patents. One problem is what to do when inventions merge ideas from the fields.