“But you are saying it like it’s a bad thing.”
I should point out that my argument is that patents are more about property rights than they are about monopoly. By extension you could argue all private property is a monopoly.
You could also say that shooting someone is free speech - you are just “expressing” your displeasure with them. But we don’t call that free speech, we call it murder.
“Monopoly” is more concerned with business practice, than private property. As such, there is some validity to gov stepping in when a business unethically manipulates the market to achieve 100% market share.
However, saying “monopoly” is bad should not be extended to saying “private property” is bad.
In grade school, you probably heard more about those evil robber barons than you did about why we have a patent system.
Propagandizing patent as monopoly is a tool of that wiley socialist to progressively bring you to the conclusion that private property is bad.
Don’t fall for it!
Correct, patents are property. Hence the designation “intellectual property” for patents, trademarks, designs.
The government granting a patent is a give-and-take situation. The inventor publishes his idea via the patent, enriching general knowledge and the collective state of the art, and in return receives an exclusive right to economically exploit the invention for a limited time of up to 20 years (where maintenance fees create a pressure to not fully make use of those 20 years).
Otherwise the invention would be kept secret as far as possible (and indeed, some inventions are more valuable as trade secrets and not patented by the inventor if they cannot be easily copied) to prevent copying, and the growth of collective knowledge would suffer - and many things needlessly be invented over and over again, at great cost.