Your history is definitely wrong. Patents don’t enforce themselves. Hollywood is on the west coast to make physical distance from Edison’s lawyers and muscle. The Wright brothers went down in history as the inventors of the airplane, but they wasted the rest of their lives fighting over the patents.
Linchpin patents are rare. Maybe you patent one invention to make it just barely work, but that’s not the end of the story. Someone else patents something else needed to make it scalable. Now there are two patents and a bilateral monopoly.
None of this is to say that patents were unimportant, so it’s not an answer at all.
Your history is definitely wrong. Patents don’t enforce themselves. Hollywood is on the west coast to make physical distance from Edison’s lawyers and muscle. The Wright brothers went down in history as the inventors of the airplane, but they wasted the rest of their lives fighting over the patents.
Linchpin patents are rare. Maybe you patent one invention to make it just barely work, but that’s not the end of the story. Someone else patents something else needed to make it scalable. Now there are two patents and a bilateral monopoly.
None of this is to say that patents were unimportant, so it’s not an answer at all.