inventions

Also, keeping inventions secret often resulted in the inventions being lost forever.

We are essentiall just stealing other people's observations/thoughts/inventions; repackaging, and refining, and in the end--calling them our own?

They've issued patents on any number of scientifically impossible inventions, in spite of rules against that sort of thing.

Ignoring the fundamentals, the desire to do astronomy has lead to more than a few useful inventions.

Hitherto [1848] it is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day's toil of any human being.

The constitutional purpose of patents was to disclose inventions that others could build on.

There has been more than enough historical cases already of inventions turning into something the inventor would dearly wish to have undone.

These spice mixtures sound an awful lot like recipes, rather than inventions, and recipes should already be unpatentable (in the US, anyway).

Sometimes new inventions give you more options, rather than just replacing something else.

Conversely, researchers have poor judgement assessing the economic value of their inventions.

The products/services/innovations/inventions will be realized regardless of these short term effects.

Furthermore, if there is no patent system, the only way to protect your inventions would be by keeping them secret and companies that do innovate would go through very costly measures of making sure their inventions are secret.

Or, there also might be a "file first and ask questions later policy" for many companies, so that valuable inventions are captured along with the junk patents, a bycatch of sorts.