Patent law and the glorification of the individual

Patent law is based on the entirely incorrect notion that an inspired individual, through hard work, can produce something of almost incalculable value which contributes greatly to the ease and utility others can enjoy. The easiest justification for this is through art: painters and musicians, especially, have been seen as of individual genius. I’m not going to argue against Beethoven and Mozart, but it seems to me that we have taken the idea of the importance of the individual far too far. Individual attribution ignores the concept of “standing on the shoulders of giants” and the standing of the individual within society, without which the individual is nothing.
But let’s look at a few of the purportedly greatest minds ever, and what they gave us. His laws of motion gave us modern physics, and his work with prisms and reflecting telescopes helped expand understanding of our world. But he was unable to deal with criticism, even to the point of being unable to tolerate open discussion of his ideas. We know now that his revolutionary, and beneficial, ideas on the mechanics of our world weren’t quite correct. Assertion that his ideas on color weren’t entirely correct drove him to complete nervous breakdown. Some of his ideas were quite mad, and his violent and vindictive attacks against both friend and foe reveal a deeply unhappy man. His set of four rules for scientific reasoning, that (1) we are to admit no more causes of natural things such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances, (2) the same natural effects must be assigned to the same causes, (3) qualities of bodies are to be esteemed as universal, and (4) propositions deduced from observation of phenomena should be viewed as accurate until other phenomena contradict them, remain profound and valuable, but are we to imagine that no-one else would have provided them soon after he did, had he not?
William Shakespeare is regarded as the world's pre-eminent dramatist, but was hardly revered during his lifetime. But it’s claimed both that he stole plots, poems, and even entire stories from other people, and that the real author of the works attributed to him was Edward de Vere (maybe with “a little clique of disappointed and defeated politicians” or substantial contributions from other royalty than de Vere, or even from members of the original acting troupe that presented the plays). Dennis McCarthy and June Schlueter recently used off-the-shelf plagiarism software to make a case that Shakespeare (or de Vere) stole from George North, a barely known writer/soldier, for almost a dozen of ‘his’ works, including “King Lear,” “Macbeth” and “Coriolanus.”
Albert Einstein is also accused of using the ideas of other people, being wrong about relativity and as mistaken about gravity as Newton. Much as with Darwin, it’s clear that had he not presented what he did when he did, someone else would soon have anyway. Somehow a need for individual heroes arose to replace more generic ones like Coyote of many Native American tribes. Most of the world has always been too wise to push individualism toward the absurdities central in our current ‘dominant narrative’ – a world-view which cannot last. Ownership, as it were, is theft. One shares in, and must share with. No man is an island, nor a prime mover. An act of invention hardly should release a person from obligations, the way too much money has come to do.
Sure, people should profit from hard work, from inventiveness, even from good inspirations that require little in the way of sweat or exertion. But how much, and for how long? Is resting on laurels really a noble occupation?