The solution already exists, in parallel with patents. If the whole goal is to "incentive innovation", then there are many ways of doing this. And we've been doing it already. If all you wanna do is incentive innovation then just give innovators what they need to innovate. That's what angel investors, angel groups, startup incubators, accelerators and even kickstarter backers do.
There's absolutely nothing about the concept of "incentive innovation" that says you must punish other innovators by giving monopolies to each individual. Of all ideas for promoting innovation you can think of, granting monopolies are among the worst ones. If before the invention of Intellectual Property, if you asked people to come up with new ideas to incentive innovation, no one would come up with "let's promote innovation by punishing innovators to pay fees to a select few". And in fact, no one did, that's not how IP was invented, it was the other way around. It started with UK monarchy monopolies with the explicit goal to make money for the monarchy. The excuse that IP protects innovation was made up later by those who were profiting from it when the monarchy fell.
Solutions to replace patents always existed, still exist and are working great. YCombinator is a great example of that. If you think it's the government who should grant some kind of incentives. I don't know about the US, but in my country we have many government programs for innovative startups. Many high tech and bio tech startups only exist because of government granted funding, incubation and mentorship.
Humans will always innovate. Solutions already exist and are working. Patents just need to stay out of our way and the rest will keep working fine.
There's absolutely nothing about the concept of "incentive innovation" that says you must punish other innovators by giving monopolies to each individual. Of all ideas for promoting innovation you can think of, granting monopolies are among the worst ones. If before the invention of Intellectual Property, if you asked people to come up with new ideas to incentive innovation, no one would come up with "let's promote innovation by punishing innovators to pay fees to a select few". And in fact, no one did, that's not how IP was invented, it was the other way around. It started with UK monarchy monopolies with the explicit goal to make money for the monarchy. The excuse that IP protects innovation was made up later by those who were profiting from it when the monarchy fell.
Solutions to replace patents always existed, still exist and are working great. YCombinator is a great example of that. If you think it's the government who should grant some kind of incentives. I don't know about the US, but in my country we have many government programs for innovative startups. Many high tech and bio tech startups only exist because of government granted funding, incubation and mentorship.
Humans will always innovate. Solutions already exist and are working. Patents just need to stay out of our way and the rest will keep working fine.