But it’s not black and white. Some people will do things for $10, others $20, others $50. We all have a different price.
With patents, it’s basically offering $50 so you get the most people doing it as possible.
If we did away with patents, it would be like offering $20. Sure, R&D will still happen… just less.
Innovators who succeed at getting a patent might get more money for their innovation. But now only one person or org can legally make incremental improvements to those ideas. Without patents, the value per innovation might be lower to an individual innovator, but there are more innovations to be made because everything is on the table.
You are not just saying "you get $50 for this innovation" you are additionally saying "this innovation is now off limits for 20 years", and there may be hundreds of potential innovators who would have invested in improvements which have been legally barred from doing so.
My classic example is the 3D printer. They were $50,000 when first sold under patent, then 13 years later they were $25,000 still under patent. Then the patents expired and within 3 years they were under $2000. Ten years after patent expiration they were $250. So the price dropped only 50% in 13 years under patent. Then with no patent it dropped 90% in three years. In ten years it dropped 99%. It takes a lot of innovation to make a $25,000 3D printer work for just $250, and absolutely none of that innovation happened with the benefit of patents. Innovation will always happen! We do not need massive government intervention to make it happen.
If you’ve ever tried to DIY something, it’s so so much harder if you can’t find someone who has done it already.
So to me, the people who may have made 3D printing cheaper aren’t exactly in the same class of innovation and risk.
It may be your favorite example but in this case it's a very poor one. You keep harping it as if it proves the point that patents are always the biggest problem holding all tech back, but in this case you're comparing apples to pickup trucks and omitting the forest from the montains.
The price of 3D printers dropped because the demand for 3D printers is huuuuge and they're also very easy to manufacture meaning in that case it actually was the patens holding the technology back and not the manufacturing challenges, but E-ink film is both tricky to manufacture and the demand for this kind of limited technology is very niche beyond e-readers and price tags meaning there's no economies of scale.
I built a 3d printer with a work colleague over 10 years ago in his garage using aluminum rails, stepper motors and an Arduino. I can't build E-ink film in a garage.
With your example you'd also think that the reason we don't have mass adoption of 3nm chips everywhere must be because of TSMC's patents and not because that sort of tech is tricky to master at scale.
Your 3d printer example just does not work in this case so please be so king as to reflect on the matter and update your viewpoint accordingly.