That's literally what the article starts with.

3 of them, if you're Catholic

>The people that are profiting the most aren't the ones actually doing the work, the science, in fact, their whole strategy is to extract more than what they put into science.

That's just arguing about % of share, which is admittedly a real problem in capitalism in general, business/enterprise/etc fields are over compensated, but that doesn't change the fundamentals, that's just playing with division of % of compensation.

The difference between a serf and this is that this is voluntarily. Ofc everything to do with labor could be argued to be somewhere on the spectrum of soft and hard "coercion", but I think inventing is way on the soft side, moreso than even current average in general.

We do more work as serfs because we want to have and do have more. Even then, if you look at the numbers they gave, it's often very close, or sometimes even more than back then.

>This is not the only way to do things. Public institutions exist and they've produced Nuclear Power, Computers, GPS, Radar, Lasers, Microwaves. Can you provide me with private sector equivalent?

And that all happened while capitalism was a thing. No one says only private sector is allowed to invent. That's one thing capitalism has going for it, you're free to form co-op, you're free to work in public sector, etc., it's not overly restrictive on following other paradigms.

>Without them, we would have no public education and if you believe that competition breeds more innovation, it's seems like you would want the barrier for entry to getting an education to be as freely available as possible? That's what you need for science. Investors are just the patron class of a long standing war against the lower classes that actually have to work for a living. That relationship has not changed and it has done more to oppress humanity than liberate us.

>The belief that we owe all innovation to this system is indoctrination and borderline Stockholm's syndrome.

I didn't say we owe all of this to this system (private sector within capitalism), just that this system produces certain solid results and isn't stifling.

Either the inventors choose to sell a patent, in which case it's mutually beneficial relationship where inventor essentially pays (or rather gives up portion of their cut) to have someone else manage the business side of the things. That's clearly their choice, because they see it as better than keeping the patent. It's also completely reasonable, inventor's goal is to invent, which translates to creating a patent. When they sell their patent, they get paid for their job. What's not generally their job is to manage licensing, legal side of the things, business, marketing, etc., so it's understandable that's left to someone else, who obviously gets paid for that.

The other possibility is that the invention was made under a company and patent automatically belongs to them. Again, this is just the inventor doing the inventing and getting paid for it, while the company provides necessary resources, assumes both the risk and possible reward, in turn providing stable income to the inventor.

In either case, the existence of the patent is why the inventors get paid.

That's not really a counter argument. If an inventor doesn't want to also be a business man selling, licensing, etc. their product, and they sell their patents to middlemen (who are responsible for the mentioned activities) for x% pay cut or front up payment instead of long term income, they still benefit from existence of patents. They wouldn't have anything to sell to the middlemen without it.

The part where patents are sold and change ownership after they're issued is irrelevant to the issue of inventors having ownership of their invention through patent.