iirc a recent study suggested that there is no measurable social benefit (eg, increase in rate of innovation) from patents, but I can't immediately find a source for that. But generally everyone has this idea of the scrappy inventor in their garage inventing the flux capacitor and that's not really how it works, patents are like H1-Bs, they are a thing that benefits the companies with enough scale and legal resources to lobby and work the system. And those guys are gonna be fine regardless.

it's unsurprising though because in general even in the happy case, you have locked an invention to a single company for 28 years and that's an eternity in the modern era. And future slight improvements effectively refresh/evergreen the patent, because there's usually only a couple viable ways of doing something. I think of this as the "e-ink" scenario, where there's this fantastic tech that's locked to a company that wants to work out recurring-revenue licensing models for hundreds of dollars per device per year and such, and slow-walks innovation secure in the knowledge that if a competitor does appear that they not only have years of head-start but could sqush them in litigation.

Then in the unhappy case you've got the places that get a patent for "updates delivered over the internet" or "e-commerce on a website" like the one that tried to shake down newegg. Most companies will just pay up rather than fight it on principle, regardless of how egregious the patent is. And such patents obviously should never be issued but the patent office don't care and the legal system allows jurisdiction-shopping that ensure that once issued, the patents will find a sympathetic venue in a red state that's happy to rake in the court fees. Imagine if it's your small LLC that gets targeted instead of a company like Newegg with enough resources to fight, this is a huge instance of that "big companies exploit the system to squash smaller upstarts" failure mode that reduces innovation.

and really the existence of the system at all essentially ensures at least some friction loss of innovation due to the mere possibility of problem B occurring. Let alone in systems (like ours) where it actually does occur frequently and blatantly.

even when it is not flagrantly obvious like the above-mentioned (real, issued) patents, the standard of "not obvious to a skilled practioner in the art" is not really being enforced, or an incredibly low bar of "not obvious" is being utilized (de facto it only seems to mean prior art). A shit-ton of these things are things that would be obvious to any engineer that sat down and worked whatever problem through. If it's going to exist, it ideally would be very narrowly targeted, and perhaps even the patent duration and terms should be customized to the significance and innovativeness of the invention. If you invent a cancer drug and take it through trials that should be handled differently than "3d printer but with a different kind of head inspired by a pastry machine that builds a print 10% better" or whatever.

unfortunately if you remove the patent system that actually disadvantages you internationally, because you didn't patent your thing! And of course it's against the international treaties/etc (which we wrote and could change but still). Again, this actually prevents you from even toning down the abuse of the system because if a US patent is harder to get than any other, you are just disadvantaging US companies. And if you create an uneven playing field for patent lifetimes/etc then that will ultimately benefit companies who can point to the billion $ they spent in R&D and against the person who invented something in their garage (how important could it really be?) and doesn't know how to sell it in the patent application/etc.

It's a race to the bottom at every level. Which is just an inherent problem with globalization (and the US federal system) in general. If you don't have a "minimum standard" then some places are gonna race to the bottom, and a rational actor is highly incentivized to find loopholes that let them eliminate those "minimum standards" and race to the bottom while everyone else is held to higher, more expensive standards.

The court-shopping problem is really just a microcosm/toy problem of these globalization problems. Same problem, different scale.