> Patents are there to stop people stealing a technology you invented and letting you have a fair shot at making a living from it.
Patents are quite explicitly not there to stop people "stealing a technology". You can already do this by keeping your invention secret (which many jurisdictions grant some form of protection).
The purpose of patents is to encourage inventors to publicly disclose their inventions so that others can benefit from and build on this knowledge, accelerating the rate of technological advance. In return the public grants the inventor a limited period of monopoly on the invention.
The patent system currently in place in the western world is not achieving the goals that the society has set it, mostly because patents are granted for "inventions" whose public disclosure has no value (because they're obvious or over broad). What we get instead are huge companies with massive patent arsenals stopping new companies from getting into business, patent trolls extorting money, and independent inventors whose patents are worthless since they cannot bear the cost of defending them against large companies.