What about patents are non-transferable and only valid, if the issuer actually makes use of them? The moment you let them rot in a drawer, you invalidate the patent. That would disable companies whose sole purpose is to "troll" others with patents they aquired from whomever, and it would also disable companies from inventing something just to block off this path to competitors, while never making use of it itself to press more money out of customers with the "old garbage".
I mean the marketing blabla behind patents is always the little inventor who found something incredible but will be eaten by the large corps, right? Which means they should be interested in actually creating a product out of it to make money, and the patent gives them a "safety" period before the big corps stomp the little guy to the curb. Or ... maybe this whole thing was a pure marketing ploy and patents have been misused in all kinds of ways in the 19th century already?
Some decades later, however the (much less broad ?) patents over steam engines able to produce circular motion, seem to have forced Watt to differentiate and improve his "2nd engine" so much that it could be differentiated enough from the other patents :
Note also that Watt was bad at business, and only owned 1/3rd of "his" patents.
Our post-modern issues seem to me to instead stem first from :
- it being too easy to shelter liability (and tax fraud !) behind complex company trees
- a failure of antitrust and lack of goal/duration-limited companies allowing companies to grow waaaay too big to the point where they have enough power to heavily weigh on governments (note though that Watt had already managed to convince the British government to give a 25 year extension on "his" "1rst" steam engine)
As I see it, the way we humans actually progress is through copying what other people did and extent on that, or get whole new ideas how to move on from that in a different way. Patents and copyright don't serve that principle, they exist to block it, to create some form of monopoly, for the sole purpose to increase profit for a few, letting society pay the cost for that. For example, the amount of hours wasted to get around patents is absolute insanity, up to the point that it can block off entire product categories because the patent is a crucial one for this to ever work.
The problem with multinationals is just icing on the cake, because they use all kinds of tools to block off competition, not just patents and copyright. And compared to the small inventor they do have the means to control for patent violations by others and go through court with that, if needed. So the whole process is highly aligned towards the wealthy to begin with.
I mean the marketing blabla behind patents is always the little inventor who found something incredible but will be eaten by the large corps, right? Which means they should be interested in actually creating a product out of it to make money, and the patent gives them a "safety" period before the big corps stomp the little guy to the curb. Or ... maybe this whole thing was a pure marketing ploy and patents have been misused in all kinds of ways in the 19th century already?