Well if you assume the judicial system is corrupt - then the real problem lies in the courts - not necessarily in patents.

>The claim that one can own an idea is silly on its face

You do realize that the la-la land you want to live in doesn't preclude the ownership of ideas. Trade secrets will always exist and there is no practical way to prevent their existence.

Not only do patents allow innovations to be shared - but it also opens up the limited-time monopolistic advantage to other industries. It's easy for Google to have a secret algorithm on their servers, or for KFC to have a secret recipe - but it's harder to have a secret algo in a DLL, or a secret engine in a car.

In your world, hilariously, in-house server side software development would be significantly more profitable than client side software development.