I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the actual purpose originally intended for patents was to get people to describe and record innovative discoveries, and eventually add them to the public domain for others to build off of.
I think transferability, renewability, and gaming of the definition of "novel" and "non-obvious", is actually what kills innovation.
The transferability is even more of a sticking point in my mind, because of it's endemic exploitation in the "automatic assignment of patent to employer" sense for disenfranchising creators of unrelated or only tangentially related work off the company clock. Then again, I can't offer a more elegant system to replace it, so I kind of have to take a Chesterton's fence-pill on that one. And besides which, having worked with engineering management, it does kind of degenerate down to "inform legal, and have them draft a waiver for an exec to sign stating the company waives interest", which is a functional, but less than ideal compromise.
I think transferability, renewability, and gaming of the definition of "novel" and "non-obvious", is actually what kills innovation.
The transferability is even more of a sticking point in my mind, because of it's endemic exploitation in the "automatic assignment of patent to employer" sense for disenfranchising creators of unrelated or only tangentially related work off the company clock. Then again, I can't offer a more elegant system to replace it, so I kind of have to take a Chesterton's fence-pill on that one. And besides which, having worked with engineering management, it does kind of degenerate down to "inform legal, and have them draft a waiver for an exec to sign stating the company waives interest", which is a functional, but less than ideal compromise.