Patents, trademarks, copyrights, etc. laws are generally written with the proper spirit. However, their application in real life is a mockery of that spirit. I'll focus on patents here since they are often the most useful.
I am an engineer who creates new ideas, designs / develops those ideas, and some of them make it onto the market. I couldn't do what I do without patents. No one would fund my work since that would be a risk that wouldn't have any foreseeable reward (someone could just copy it instantly and undercut the company who had to pay for R&D). So, the idea that they can attempt to make a profit without piracy for a set number of years is necessary.
But, we have to keep in mind the spirit of the laws. In exchange for the right to forbid others from copying your ideas you are supposed to teach the world how to make your novel, non-obvious, and specific ideas. And therein lies the problem. The way that they are used now, patents are breaking that spirit. The four key parts in bold need to be reformed as they are broken.
1) The teach the world part has been a joke for quite some time. Most patents are written now to hide the actual workings of the idea. Most patents now are buried in a pile of other patents so they are nearly impossible to find (even after paying a patent attorney $20k+). Most patents now give so many non-specific information that even if you find the patent you still don't know which combination is the right combination. Etc. Then you have the issue of submarine patents, often bought by patent trolls, hiding hoping that someone will violate it and then can be sued. A hidden patent isn't teaching the world how to make and use your idea.
2) Too many patents are issued for non-novel ideas. Take the antacid drug Prilosec/Nexium as a blatant example. Prilosec was a combination of two drugs (two forms of the same molecule, but one was optically the reverse of the other). As Prilosec's patent was about to expire, the patent office gave AstraZeneca a brand new patent with a new starting point for Nexium (which is just one of the two drugs in a pill instead of both). I'm sorry, but if you patent and sell a set of pencils with one pencil painted yellow and one painted green, it isn't novel to sell just the green pencil alone.
3) Too many patents are issued for obvious changes. To keep the post small, the Prilosec/Nexium would be a good example to consider here. If both forms of the drug are the same, then it is obvious that just one would perform well.
4) Specificity has been long lost. I've seen patents that have thousands of claimed dimensions for the same item and thousands more dimensions for every other item in the invention. The total number of combinations are in the trillions or more. Yet, they are only selling one item, because only one combination works well. They should patent that one combination. But instead they hope to patent the entire world and hope to catch someone on an unrelated product. Sorry, that shouldn't be allowed.
The reverse of course is true from the opposite side. Try to patent anything and you are 100% guaranteed to be rejected since they'll claim your better cleaning toothbrush patent application is an obvious result of my patent on a faster computer processor. Of course, that is a rediculus conclusion. But, then you have to pay tens of thousands of dollars to a patent attorney to fight that rediculus decision. Patents have turned into a mockery.