Patent holders are absolutely producers. Even if the "holder" is not manufacturing, they are actively looking for licensees, restitution for inventors who have been infringed. Edison licensed most of his patents and had to ligate many times. Would we have been better off denying his patents? Increasing the level of technology is the only way to increase REAL per capita income. Patents are property rights in inventions and how much would you invest in an idea that you could not get a property right for. One of the reasons third world countries(corrupt govts) remain so is because they cannot perfect property rights in their houses, businesses, land or inventions. Check out Heritage Foundation's Economic Freedom Index. One of the indices is How protected is Intellectual Property in a given country. Here is Ayn Rand on inventors and IP:

"What the patent and copyright laws acknowledge is the paramount role of mental effort in the production of material values; these laws protect the mind’s contribution in its purest form: the origination of an idea. The subject of patents and copyrights is intellectual property.

An idea as such cannot be protected until it has been given a material form. An invention has to be embodied in a physical model before it can be patented; a story has to be written or printed. But what the patent or copyright protects is not the physical object as such, but the idea which it embodies. By forbidding an unauthorized reproduction of the object, the law declares, in effect, that the physical labor of copying is not the source of the object’s value, that that value is created by the originator of the idea and may not be used without his consent; thus the law establishes the property right of a mind to that which it has brought into existence.

It is important to note, in this connection, that a discovery cannot be patented, only an invention. A scientific or philosophical discovery, which identifies a law of nature, a principle or a fact of reality not previously known, cannot be the exclusive property of the discoverer because: (a) he did not create it, and (b) if he cares to make his discovery public, claiming it to be true, he cannot demand that men continue to pursue or practice falsehoods except by his permission. He can copyright the book in which he presents his discovery and he can demand that his authorship of the discovery be acknowledged, that no other man appropriate or plagiarize the credit for it—but he cannot copyright theoretical knowledge. Patents and copyrights pertain only to the practical application of knowledge, to the creation of a specific object which did not exist in nature—an object which, in the case of patents, may never have existed without its particular originator; and in the case of copyrights, would never have existed."
AR, "Capitalism The Unknown Ideal"