A patent can only "stifle competition" when the invention has market value. Therefore, the company that filed that patent had produced something valuable in the first place. I argue that they deserve to benefit from it.
I don't have a problem with suggestions to improve the patent system, such as pedhaps reducing the duration of patents or raising the barrier so that fewer "trivial" patents are granted. But broadly speaking, they do a good job at incentivicing research.
Inventions with market value are protected by trade secrets and only trivial and tedious part are patented around this true secret. In that case, nobody knows the true secret by reading you 1000000 patents. But, if they independently invent it again, some methods involves in this process can easily violate one of the 1000000 patents.
All that suggests is that patents produced by academia have a really crappy ROI. Not surprised at all, given how little incentive academia has to produce marketable products.
Also, you directly contradict yourself when you state that (1) patents unfairly enrich their holders and (2) patents provide a poor ROI. Which way is it?
Example of what you said earlier -- you keep commenting under two different accounts.
>> [ME] Do patent protections provide them an incentive to do that research?
> [YOU] The main incentive is money, patents are seen as a moat to that
I suspect both are true, for different types of patents.
Tons of low-quality, generic software patents are good for extracting small settlements. Especially when the firm wielding said patents can dissolve and reform overnight to dodge negative judgements, there's very little downside.
Separately, funding serious research purely for the purposes of creating high quality patents does not seem like a winning proposition.
Unsure of where creating patents in the normal course of business and using them for M&A leverage or for tit-for-tat deterrence falls on ROI scale.
I don't have a problem with suggestions to improve the patent system, such as pedhaps reducing the duration of patents or raising the barrier so that fewer "trivial" patents are granted. But broadly speaking, they do a good job at incentivicing research.