Being against all patents is an extreme position. Imagine investing 10 years and Hundreds of millions of dollars into making a brand new revolutionary motor for train propulsion. And having it ripped off within the first year of commercially using it because it wasn't patented.
The point of patents (at least in the US) is to benefit society. The question is if granting a monopoly on ideas is actually benefiting society. Thomas Jefferson wrote:
"That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe ... seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, ... incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property."[1]
He then goes on to point out that patents "may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from anybody".
Given the abuse of the patent system and little evidence of it benefiting society, it's hardly an "extreme position" to be against patents.
I think the problem is that "idea" is such a broad spectrum. The "idea" of 1 click purchasing being patented -that's not helping anyone. The "idea" of a specific valve design which gives a 5% boost in efficiency? Something like that might have taken 10 years to figure out, but if it has no patent protection it can (and will) be copied by competitors the moment they can get their hands on your first machine.
Thomas Jefferson lived in a very different time to us. The investment in time and resources required to develop incremental modern technology is so vastly greater than it was then that his words are almost moot.
One weakness I see in arguments based on the amount of time required to discover something is that they don't take into account the possibility that lone inventor A used a painstaking brute force search to come up with a solution to a problem, when independent researcher B could have solved the problem in five minutes by applying known theory.
"If Edison had a needle to find in a haystack, he would proceed at once with the diligence of the bee to examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search. ... I was a sorry witness of such doings, knowing that a little theory and calculation would have saved him ninety per cent of his labor." - Nikola Tesla
There are times when that applies and times when it definitely doesn't. It's almost impossible to construct a legal system which recognises that. I'm not sure if quoting people who lived over a century ago is useful when discussing modern patent needs though. In the time since then we've established a much more defined engineering process informed by scientific research. Inventors typically aren't dabbling in new fields, but have spent years understanding the background of the field in which they work.
There are many industrial processes, mechanical and electrical designs and drugs which would have been almost impossible to arrive at without extensive testing and trial and error. It's worth noting that hindsight is key. It's easy to look back at almost any patent and say "it's obvious that that nozzle design or molecule works like it does, because it fits these theories.
Fundamentally, legal protection of innovation is required for investment. The current patent system is certainly flawed, but to argue for the complete abolition of it doesn't recognise the significant investment required to advance many technologies.
