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I agree that, in most cases, copyright law and patent law account for this (although I do agree wholeheartedly that it needs a pruning!) But I can think of cases where a government might want to step in, and where they have done so. For example, the author of Peter Pan willed his copyright to a children's hospital and since the funds from his books have supported that hospital, the government there made a special exception so that this one specific work would not enter into the public domain when it should have. Another example I can think of---although I don't know enough about science to know all the specifics---was the story about the people who worked on the 'hunt for the gene responsible for hereditary breast cancer.' They found it---and then began charging people several hundred dollars if they wanted the test to determine if they had it. And nobody else could run the test without the knowledge they had of the gene. I don't remember if they actually were forced to lower the price of the test and/or give others the information so they could develop their own cheaper tests, but I do think a case like that might be a situation where the greater good outweighs the need of one company to profit.
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