In many fields there are waves with the patent expiration cycle, for instance 3D printing or VR.
As the patents expire there is a flurry of new research, everyone obtains new patents and it becomes impossible to create viable products again, until the patents expire and the cycle begins again.
That's very interesting, especially considering that patents were originally created to incentivize people to publish details of inventions so they could be publicly known and accessible in perpetuity.
To better uphold their original purpose, perhaps the patent rights period should be shortened to 6 years or thereabouts.
I'm not convinced you need those published details to begin with, especially to the degree to justify the enormous legal apparatus necessary to perpetuate the patent system. Its become much easier to reverse engineer almost any physical good that the original proposition "publish the technical details of your inventions" could just be a future act of good faith and less a legal requirement for a government granted monopoly on the invention. Probably the best example is Coke - theres a popularized meme of the formula being a trade secret (and thus not patented) but the actual drink has been reverse engineered at least once a decade as a publicity stunt for most of the last century. Turns out the value in Coke is in its trademark, not in its formula. That applies to almost every context most people formulate when trying to justify the continued patent regime we have in place.
Patents are only a problem for technologies with successful application. Ideally, once you have covered the R&D cost, it should be free for all.
Technologies without successful application is the interesting case. With patents, like in this case, they are locked for a while, but at least someone can pick them up. The alternative is to become lost in the archive of some R&D department.
That said, that's difficult to say. We have patents, companies haven't had to find a way to live in a modern world where obfuscation, secrecy are the primordial part of their DNA. Would we have had OSS before, or not at all? I guess that NDA and anti-compete contract laws would be much stricter maybe at a stifling level, medieval guilds style.
Ideally, once you have covered the R&D cost, it should be free for all.
Not unless the R&D cost includes all of the R&D into unsuccessful products that didn't get productized.
Also complicating the debate is pharmaceuticals, where you're also covering the cost of FDA approval, clinical trials, etc. Per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_drug_development this cost comes out to several billion per successful drug among established players. (A single drug is several hundred million, but most drugs fail.)
It seems like an unjustified, kind of Panglossian, assumption that all of the unsuccessful research was necessary and that the returns from patents are exactly equal to the necessary costs. Markets are powerful optimization machines, but that is too often taken dogmatically to prove we are in the best of all possible worlds.
I didn't make any such assumption. I just said that if you only cover R&D on success and fail to cover typical failures, people won't have an economic incentive for doing R&D.
In fact the returns are higher than the necessary costs, including the costs of the failures. That is one of the reasons that pharma is profitable.
However what this also means is that big pharma lobbies hard for long patent terms. And when they get them, then other fields, such as software, have to put up with them.
As the patents expire there is a flurry of new research, everyone obtains new patents and it becomes impossible to create viable products again, until the patents expire and the cycle begins again.