I don't dispute that there have been changes in the way the patent system is used with regard to carving out protection from competition (at least for a while). Nevertheless, there is a clear and accelerating upward trend in virtually every area of science and technology.
Read the first paragraph from a book review Michael Shermer did in the WSJ the other day:
"If every image made and every word written from the earliest stirring of civilization to the year 2003 were converted to digital information, the total would come to five exabytes. An exabyte is one quintillion bytes, or one billion gigabytes—or just think of it as the number one followed by 18 zeros. That's a lot of digital data, but it's nothing compared with what happened from 2003 through 2010: We created five exabytes of digital information every two days. Get ready for what's coming: By next year, we'll be producing five exabytes every 10 minutes. How much information is that? The total for 2010 of 912 exabytes is the equivalent of 18 times the amount of information contained in all the books ever written. The world is not just changing, and the change is not just accelerating; the rate of the acceleration of change is itself accelerating."
That is incredible (while on one level it is rather depressing that part of this is from people posting YouTube videos of their friends crashing bikes into trees).
Link: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203646004577213203698503484.html?mod=googlenews_wsj