Re:Thats better, but not optimal (Score 1)

A patent is the only protection an independent inventor really has against multibillion dollar corporations simply stealing his ideas. There's nothing fundamentally wrong with patents per se, but they need to be granted intelligently (i.e. for things that really are new inventions, not things that are obvious and/or have been in use for years, as often happens), and also it should not be prohibitively expensive for bright but poor inventors to get them. Something that I think people often forget is that most things that are patented aren't the result of a lucky brainwave, and most patents don't bring in billions, or even millions. They are the result of months or years of hard work, study and research and it's rare that a single patent will bring in massive amounts of income in return, if you're lucky it might pay you for all the work you put in developing it.