RE:patents bad? yes.
"Patents should help protect ideas, not money. Almost noone who only invests vast amounts of his time to work on a good idea will get it patented"
You say this as if the people doing the meaningful work technologically and scientifically are all funding themselves and doing it in their spare time.
This obviously isn't true. Most real scientific and technological breakthroughs come from teams of well funded scientists.
Sure, the person who invented the ring pull can may have had a hard time protecting his intellectual property. But in the grand scheme of things who gives a shit? It's not some huge breakthrough, it's just a ring on the top of a can. And no doubt that guy wanted to make his millions, and has by now because he invested huge amounts of money in an idea he believed in.
A lot of people get patents granted, spend thousands upon thousands in the process and then never think of a marketable product.
Then when someone does they charge through the nose for the right to use it. Is this fair? Would this happen less if it was cheap and easy to patent something? No. It would be 10 times worse.