Without patents, the information wouldn't be lost, it would be tied up as trade secrets, forcing every competitor to reinvent the proverbial wheel
Patents are routinely issued on inventions that are obvious to one skilled in the art of reverse engineering. For example, contributors to FFmpeg have disassembled and documented plenty of video codecs.
"Obvious to one skilled in the art of reverse engineering" means obvious to someone who has seen the invention, taken it apart, figured out how it works, etc. And duh, once you've studied something in intimate detail, of course it's going to be obvious. That's irrelevant though - the question for patents is whether the invention was obvious at the time of invention, before anyone got to see what the inventor did.
rather than simply paying a small royalty to the first inventor and going on to invent the next improvement
And in a lot of cases, the royalty isn't "small" at all because the inventor wants to exclude a category of products from the market entirely. Think of when the late Steve Jobs promised that Apple was prepared to go "thermonuclear" on Android.
Good point - that's why we don't have any Android devices on the market.
/posted from my Android tablet
Kickstarter is not a patronage system. If it was, then we'd have Neal Stephenson locked in a dungeon.
In addition to restricting the number of works, this would also restrict the number of viewpoints, as only those wealthy patrons' desired works would be created.
It doesn't take "wealthy patrons" to produce a work expressing a viewpoint. Anyone who owns a personal computer and a year of Internet access can self-produce and self-publish a work in plenty of forms, such as the written word, a podcast, an animated video, or even a video game.
Yes, and because they hold copyright in that work, they can charge for copies and prevent others from re-publishing it without paying royalties. If there was no copyright, they'd take that year, self-produce and self-publish, and the next day, everyone would have a copy for free, and they'd have no income from that year of work.
Or, conversely, as I said, they would have only published that work for their patron, who paid them in advance to create it, under a contract where they couldn't publish it anywhere else. Artists gotta eat, man.