Patents per person by country

My fifth grader is learning about entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship at school.  Her homework tonight was a packet of questions whose answers are found via web searches (most homework, now-a-days). One of the questions was something like "where does America rank in patents filed per year?"  among the countries of the world that honor patent law, one supposes.  The answer is #2 behind Japan, according to Google.  I became curious about the data and created a spreadsheet of the countries with the most patents per year and their populations.  I calculated patents per thousand people and came up with this table:

	country	patents	population	(patents/person)*1000
1	Japan	502,054	127600000	3.93
2	South Korea	172,342	50000000	3.45
3	Switzerland	26,640	8000000	3.33
4	Finland	10,133	5400000	1.88
5	Sweden	17,051	9500000	1.79
6	Germany	135,748	82000000	1.66
7	Netherlands	25,927	16770000	1.55
8	United States	400,769	314000000	1.28
9	Israel	9,877	8000000	1.23

So Japan has almost four patents per thousand people; the USA is behind the Fins, Swedes, Germans, and Dutch with about 1.3.  But what do these data really mean?  Aren't patents and the patent system evil?  Does information want to be free?  I am also now curious about the number of individuals per country with one or more patents.  An efficient Google-Brain-powered patent adviser would  enable one person to file a patent per week or 50 per year.