Patent systems are definitely broken. I think that’s the conclusion of most neutral observers starting fresh and that digging past the purely abstract or ideological level. The reason it’s hard to do something about is that patents are property and the legal setup for property is foundational to an economy.
Patents are absolutely fundamental to the way medical research works today, especially the search for new treatments and medicines. That’s a tricky thing to mess around with. There are obvious problems. There are speculations about what fixing them could yield on one hand. In the other hand is a massive industry producing a lot of technology, science and actual treatments for diseases.
What seems (to me) to be missing in these debates is some humility about knowing the answers. While our culture is speeding through “movements” at a higher rate than ever before, we still tend to approach these big political/philosophical/economic issues with an early modern/modernist perspective. Our most popular philosophers for these matters are old dead guys who liked to think of big organic things like society and civilization in terms of how we should set things up if we had snapped into existence today, a clean slate. That’s a fairly pompous perspective.
In any case, I think the patents and intellectual property problem is a very tricky one to solve. Experiment with possible solutions is almost impossible. IP legally mimics regular property in a metaphor-like way. That metaphor is proving increasingly inaccurate. At the same time, we have huge pieces of our economy and whatnot built on it. At the same time our legal systems are showing signs that they might need a reimagining. Many of our legal constructs such as ‘legal entity’ or ‘jurisdiction’ are being pushed to extremes, and metaphors eventually break. Does the concept of a company legally approximating a person hold up when we have impenetrable layers of ownership across jurisdictions? Does the metaphor fray?