Marco Arment:
The idea of the patent system is sold to gullible people as a necessary protector of small inventors — which is a nice fairy tale, and nothing more — and it reinforces the destructive but all-too-common fallacy that great ideas are rare, novel, unique, and immediately so valuable that simply having a great idea will suddenly cause somebody, somewhere, somehow to make you rich and you’ll never have any problems again.
We therefore value ideas above their execution, and that’s exactly how the patent system is designed, despite history showing that good execution is far more important and provides far more value to society in almost every instance regardless of who filed the first patent on the underlying idea. (Not to mention the value to society of a vibrant market of diverse, competing alternatives.)
Like most laws and policies that chiefly benefit lawyers and big business, our voters, lobbyists, and politicians will keep supporting the patent fairy tale indefinitely as the rest of us get taxed, shaken down, or bankrupted by its reality.