Judge who shelved Apple trial says patent system out of sync (Reuters)

Therein lies the heart of the problem. As our economy becomes increasingly specialized, the meaning of "obvious" changes. A patent agent will never have as specialized a skill set as the patentee. So, to the agent many of these ideas don't seem at all obvious. (I once took a patent law class packed with actual agents from the USPTO, and we had some interesting debates.) Likewise, the legal meaning of the person with "ordinary skill in the art" has not kept pace with reality. Nowadays specialties in "the art" come and go like the seasons. (And that's because the markets come and go like the seasons.) And it's those specialties against which "obviousness" should be benchmarked. But that's 10x more impractical than even the present system.

How anybody can promote patents is beyond me. It harkens back to communist times, where people thought you could appoint a central committee to manage industry. I really think it only exists because of a weird sense of entitlement, fostered by the fantasy of the little guy making it big by coming up with the next greatest thing. And that's pretty much like communism, where the manual laborer was promised economic justice. We've since learned that no government can promise justice wrt manual labor, yet still are addicted to the idea of justice to the inventor.

I can sort of understand pharmaceutical patents, but there's no pretense there. Almost every argument supporting pharma patents admits that it's a tax to compensate for strict market regulations. And it's equally obvious that pharma companies intensively engage in regulatory arbitrage, trying to maximize monopoly profits against minimum development and safety testing costs, which leads to products of dubious utility which probably didn't need the benefit of such rigorous testing.