I don't know if abolishing patents altogether would improve innovation. But I'm pretty sure that patents on obvious things hinder innovation, rather than help it.
I'm not familiar with the invention of flash freezing. Did the inventor just patent the idea of freezing food fast? That sounds like a pretty obvious idea that should not be patentable. Why give someone a monopoly on quick freezing?
Or did the inventor patent a non-obvious mechanical device that is capable of quickly freezing food? Giving the inventor a short term monopoly on that device in exchange for publishing the blueprints sounds like a reasonable deal.
Yeah, there's a lot of bad patents, especially in the tech sphere, where the patent office & judges lack expertise to evaluate both what's in use and what's obvious. E.g. when someone almost successfully patented the concept of a e-"shopping cart" after it was in widespread use (also it's painfully obvious).
In the case of flash freezing, hasn't the market shown that the idea of quickly freezing food (to preserve the food without producing large ice crystals) was novel when he invented it? We have been able to freeze food for hundreds of years, and nobody was doing it that way until 1924. That sounds like a non-obvious novel idea to me.
I'm not familiar with the invention of flash freezing. Did the inventor just patent the idea of freezing food fast? That sounds like a pretty obvious idea that should not be patentable. Why give someone a monopoly on quick freezing?
Or did the inventor patent a non-obvious mechanical device that is capable of quickly freezing food? Giving the inventor a short term monopoly on that device in exchange for publishing the blueprints sounds like a reasonable deal.