No, it's not like that at all. IMO that analogy does not make any sense. First, r&d is not just thinking up stuff and then making them. In drug discovery it involves expensive trials. In other fields it may involve a lot of building and scraping things, sometimes from expensive material. Patent should be an incentive to do all that knowing that once that it's done it can monetized in a way that does not allow other companies just to copy and paste without effort. Should they be able to do it for everything and forever? Probably not and that is what I was referring to.