I mean the marketing blabla behind patents is always the little inventor who found something incredible but will be eaten by the large corps, right? Which means they should be interested in actually creating a product out of it to make money, and the patent gives them a "safety" period before the big corps stomp the little guy to the curb. Or ... maybe this whole thing was a pure marketing ploy and patents have been misused in all kinds of ways in the 19th century already?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33505728
Some decades later, however the (much less broad ?) patents over steam engines able to produce circular motion, seem to have forced Watt to differentiate and improve his "2nd engine" so much that it could be differentiated enough from the other patents :
https://technicshistory.com/2021/10/10/the-steam-revolution/
Note also that Watt was bad at business, and only owned 1/3rd of "his" patents.
Our post-modern issues seem to me to instead stem first from :
- it being too easy to shelter liability (and tax fraud !) behind complex company trees
- a failure of antitrust and lack of goal/duration-limited companies allowing companies to grow waaaay too big to the point where they have enough power to heavily weigh on governments (note though that Watt had already managed to convince the British government to give a 25 year extension on "his" "1rst" steam engine)
The problem with multinationals is just icing on the cake, because they use all kinds of tools to block off competition, not just patents and copyright. And compared to the small inventor they do have the means to control for patent violations by others and go through court with that, if needed. So the whole process is highly aligned towards the wealthy to begin with.
