If academia is only 5 years behind then it doesn't seem a good deal for the public to give 20 years monopoly on ideas, particularly so if those ideas build on top of each other and lead to patent gridlock. (Of course in reality, academia is part of this patent gridlock, but the general point remains)
The point is more that academic research is reinventing the wheel rather than doing genuinely productive research. Instead of researchers researching stuff that needs to be researched, a significant number of them are researching things that other researchers have known the answer to for years. It is not an effective use of human capital.
