patents harm society (and commerce) by diverting wealth (and therefore power) from the people doing real ongoing work to the people who filed paperwork on someone else's tangentially related work years earlier, often without anyone being aware of any claimed tenuous connection at the time the work is done

this makes patents a random timebomb on any business endeavour, like earthquakes or wars

so either abolish them or provide universal patent insurance (== the government pays everybody's patent license bills out of taxes)