The curse of patents!
If electricity was patented, you’d be using coasters to make notes instead of PDAs !
Patents are the legal way of preventing innovation. They are created with only one agenda in mind, “No one should be able to work on the concept that we thought of first”. Furthermore, if another entity independently invents the same concept, that person will not be allowed to use it, because someone else has already claimed it to be their property.
In a bid to protect the interest of the entity who “first filed” the patent, that entity is automatically assumed to be the best entity who can improve upon it. The long terms of patents deprive other potential researchers to use the invention.
The situation is worse for bio-patents and life saving drug patents, which is less legal terms is a way of saying “Pay us or die”. Corporates in developed nations use patents as a weapon against their competition in developing countries to ensure that they never raise upto them.
The solution lies only with the Governments. If a central organization such as WTO can stand ground to decide the value of a patent in commercial terms, and the competition is allowed to pay a fixed amount to the inventor, the world can be freed of this curse that is slowing down the growth of the world.