Yup - and this is where it all falls apart...

Yup - and this is where it all falls apart...

The entire idea of the patent system is to make it so that those ideas are available for other people to use freely after the patent expires. If there was not such a system then there would be the risk of such ideas being lost, or locked up through trade secrets (with all the inefficiencies involved with maintaining such secrets, even where they are possible) for much longer time periods.

Yet most patents cover ideas which can not be lost for they are embodies in millions of copies around the world and can be easily reverse-engineered.

Our world today is what it is due to technologies that could have been locked up with trade secrets that are instead now freely available to use. Think of such things as how we make Steel or Aluminum and consider what would have happened if those were trade secrets of one particular company, with every employee being locked up under contract to not reveal the secrets.

Sure. If you can not guess how the product is made even if you have it in your hands - then it's fair justification for monopoly. How many patents describe things like THAT? 0.1%? 1%?

Those are a couple examples where the process could be kept secret while selling the result. Prior to the patent system it would have been likely that such ideas would have died with the inventor, and had very little effect outside the immediate area (remember that if secrecy is your only protection against being flattened by your rivels you don't want to let many people in on the secret, which limits how large you can grow)

Nobody argues agains these patents. But why keep all the software patents around? The "great idea" embedded in software can not be easily lost: even if nobody has the source you can still use the same old implementation via emulators and recompilers. The initial justifications for patents is bogus in 99% cases for physical patents and 100% cases for software.