Patents Are Broken and It’s Screwing All of Us

When invented patents made sense. Simple deal: you come up with something cool, we’ll give you exclusive rights to make money off it for a while, and then everyone gets to use it. Fair trade means inventors get rewarded, society eventually benefits from shared knowledge.

But have we screwed this up.

The Original Idea vs. Reality

The patent system was supposed to encourage innovation. Invent something useful, get protected for 20 years or so, make your money back plus a nice profit, then let others build on your work. Everyone wins.

Instead, we’ve created a monster. Companies now spend more time and money gaming the patent system than actually innovating. They file thousands of patents on the tiniest modifications, sue each other constantly, and use legal tricks to keep competitors out of markets for decades. It’s become a weapon against innovation, not a tool to protect it.

The Smartphone Wars: When Patents Go Insane

Remember when Apple and Samsung were basically at war in every courthouse on the planet? Started in 2011 and went on for years. Apple claimed Samsung copied everything from the iPhone’s “bounce-back” scrolling to having rounded corners on their phones. Yes, rounded corners.

Think about that for a second. Apple tried to own the idea of rectangles with rounded edges. They got over a billion dollars in damages because Samsung’s phones looked too much like rectangles with rounded corners and had icons on the screen.

This wasn’t protecting innovation, it was trying to own basic design concepts that anyone would naturally come up with. It’s like Ford trying to patent “four wheels and a steering wheel” and then suing every other car company.

The craziest part? By 2012, these two companies were fighting in more than 50 lawsuits worldwide. They were spending more money on lawyers than on actually making better phones. And who paid for all this legal bullshit? Us. Higher phone prices for everyone while innovation slowed down because companies were too busy suing each other.

Patent Trolls: The Ultimate Parasites

Then there are patent trolls, these are companies that don’t make anything. They just buy up old patents and threaten to sue anyone who might be using similar ideas. These parasites sent out over 100,000 threatening letters in one year alone, basically saying “pay us or we’ll drag you to court.”

They’re not innovating, they’re not creating jobs, they’re not helping anyone. They’re just legal extortionists. And it’s working — companies paid them $29 billion in 2011 just to make them go away. That’s money that could have gone into actual research and development.

Medicine: Where Patents Kill People

But the real evil is in medicine. Take these new weight-loss drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy. They actually work — could help millions of Americans with obesity and diabetes. But they cost over $1,000 a month because the companies have built a wall of patents around them.

Here’s the kicker: these drugs cost under 1% of their selling price to actually manufacture. We’re talking pennies to make, thousands to buy. The companies aren’t protecting some massive research investment — they’re milking a cash cow.

How do they do it? They don’t just patent the drug itself. They patent the injection pen, the dosing schedule, how you store it, probably the color of the cap. One drug has over 300 patent applications. They’re not protecting innovation; they’re blocking competition with legal paperwork.

And who suffers? The people who need these drugs most. Black Americans have much higher rates of obesity and diabetes but get only 12% of the prescriptions because they can’t afford them. Meanwhile, the drug companies are spending more on stock buybacks than on research.

The Simple Fix

We don’t need to scrap patents entirely. We just need to stop being idiots about them.

What should get patents: Actual breakthroughs. New chemical compounds that took years to discover. Revolutionary technologies that nobody else could have figured out.

What shouldn’t get patents: Obvious things. Rounded corners. Injection pens. Slightly different dosing schedules. Basic user interface features that any designer would think of.

What we should do:

• Stop granting patents for obvious improvements anyone could make
• Limit how many related patents companies can file on the same basic invention
• Make it way harder for patent trolls to shake people down
• Let competitors make generic versions when the original invention is easy to replicate

Other Countries Get It

Want proof this works? China’s patent on these weight-loss drugs expires in 2026, and at least 11 Chinese companies are already developing generic versions. Analysts predict 25% price drops once competition starts. Same drugs, way cheaper prices, because competition actually works.

The Bottom Line

Patents should reward people who invent genuinely useful stuff. But they shouldn’t let companies own basic concepts or block competition for decades with legal tricks.

Right now, we’re paying higher prices for everything from phones to life-saving drugs while companies spend their profits on lawyers instead of inventors. It’s backwards, it’s stupid, and it’s hurting all of us.

We can fix this. We just need to remember what patents were actually supposed to do: encourage innovation, not strangle it.