The entire idea of capitalism is to have fierce competition between companies -- patents, by design, allow one company to innovate once, then nobody else can make something similar. That seems, very anti-competitive (and open for abuse as evidenced by today's "patent wars").
If nobody could "squat" on an idea, then instead of innovating once, you would have to continuously innovate to stay in the lead of your industry.
If you need to pay billions of research cost for something that can be immediately copied, you simply don't do the research. There's plenty of cheap more or less useless improvements instead.
We already see that in medicine, where R&D has become so ludicrously expensive for many actually needed drugs that people would rather create a new ED pill.
Capitalism & "free markets" (as if!) fail as a motor of progress, per se. The only thing they're good at is extraction of wealth. That's why we have government regulation in the first place - to direct the efficiencies created by the market place.
You mean pharmaceutical, not "medicine". The reason why the costs have gone up is because big pharma has become so bloated and top heavy they can't even fart straight. They no longer even develop new drugs, they buy little, fleet-of-foot companies that do. You know: the ones actually trying to _make_ something: the ones competing.
How did they get that way? Because of the patent system.
Your narrative actually supports the opposite position. Why would big pharma companies buy "little, fleet-of-foot companies" if they could simply wait for those companies to develop a drug, copy the formula, then bury those companies using their huge advertising budgets? The winning strategy in a world without patents in an industry with high R&D requirements is to never develop anything new, but spend all your money on advertising and building an efficient outsourced manufacturing operation.
Just look at the PC industry, where the technology is all open and commoditized. Acer, Lenovo, Asus, etc, own the market, nobody makes any real money, and nobody tries to innovate because new designs are easily copied and margins are razor-thin.
Your argument only works when you have large lazy incumbents that the patent system created in the first place. In a world without laws that say you own ideas, these large lazy incumbents don't exist.
Manuel Navia[0] would likely disagree. To an extent, at least.
The fleet-footed companies you talk about, generate at best, lead compounds. Turning those leads to INDs (investigational new drugs) and then actual "medicine" is totally controlled by the FDA and is a multi-year, multi-million dollar endeavor, that is well beyond the ken of the fleet-footed operators. Many of these drug candidates fail late in the game, after 5-10 years of human trials, sinking the investment of time and effort with them. Meanwhile the patent clock is running and a drug that hits the market has far less than the 20 year patent term to recoup the costs and generate revenue to discover and groom the next life saving drug.
I read some article a while ago explaining that a lot of these costs are inflated by the drug cartels, er, I mean big pharma. And that a lot of regulations are there to create artificial barriers to entry and are promoted by big pharma for this reason. It comes all of one piece: patents encourage lazy encumbancy which encourages regulation, which encourages patents.
Also, highly impractical.