Patents also choke creativity, and arguably in a worse way. If you can't remix existing ideas, how are you supposed to create anything useful if you need to come up with an alternative scheme to every component problem that has already been solved but is already patented.

Yeah, it had taken me 10 years of heavy R&D investments to come up with this ingenious idea that the phone can have rounded corners. /s

Sorry but the situation now it that one can not even fart without breaking some patent. It is ridiculous, serves only big corps and keeps smaller companies under constant threat of litigations they can not afford. And most of the patents are plain obvious.

I was once asked to come up with the idea of how to implement some XXX feature. It had taken me about 10 minutes to "invent" the main approach and then couple of days to spec it down to such form that it could be given to subcontractor. Upon checking however we've easily found at least 10 patents covering this exact XXX. And this is everywhere.

From a tool to compensate the inventors the patents system has become a tool to serve fat cats.