system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
CMV: Ending of Patent rights for major companies would be a good thing

I'm of the belief that our current patent laws, allowing corporations to hold a vast number of patents on software and hardware for decades is detrimental to our technological and financial development. 

It enables monopolies to be formed, as competitors are forced to work around using already discovered methods of doing things and building upon them and instead have to reinvent the same technology over and over again, a cost prohibitive process that locks upstarts out of most industries and slows down research on new technologies. 

China rapidly advanced technologically due to their infringing on US patent laws to learn how to create pretty much all of their modern technology while making a profit and have steadily built upon that which they learned (in the phone and AI sectors for example). They brought costs down and were able to extend that benefit to their citizenry at large. 

While I'm in favor of allowing a short patent window, especially for small businesses (independent engineers) I feel like there should be some kind of check on how many years of patents any megacorporation can hold. So for example, Adobe has hundreds of years worth of patented software due to the diversity of products produced by engineers under their gigantic corporation and virtually every graphic designer uses this software. Additionally, the software to run certain kinds of web material is embedded into browsers and has been for my entire life and they control this as well. They clearly don't have a monopoly on the computer graphics industry, but they have such outsized influence that they could theoretically do significant damage to those coming up or already established in various digital enterprises, have first pick of developers - allowing them to more rapidly advance than their competition and their parents slow down independent web development. 

The Open source movement should be more than a form of tech charity/commune style business, it should be expected and demanded by consumers and workers, as it weakens the power of corporations and shifts it back to the innovators while lowering prices. It would almost defeat the purpose of having software companies, but for the reputation that comes with brands and consistent compatibility between products.

Why would this not be a good idea?
gpt
Well, the purpose of patent is to promote sharing the ideas in return for having protection on them, for a limited time. An alternative is that everything would become a trade secret, and many innovations would not be shared at all. Not to say that there not could be a better law to promote sharing the ideas, but just removing possibility of patenting things by corporations is not be as obvious an improvement as it seems at first glance.