Firstly, it sounds like nearly every person is a member of a clan, which changes the game pretty sharply. The people who aren't members of a clan, well, they just can't engage in creative labor; they'd have to be employed on a fixed basis by some clan that handles the rights to whatever minimum of tools and skills are necessary to do their job. At some point this becomes functionally indistinguishable from being adopted into the clan, which gives me an idea I'll go into more detail on later.
Secondly, the existence of a clan structure suggests a certain maximum practical size. Highly successful clans probably undergo 'fission' into multiple clans that jointly profit from the rights to anything discovered by their forebear. So if you take a technology that's been around for several hundred years like "the steam engine," the odds are that by now there are a LOT of people who are members of clans that jointly own the rights because they are ALL descended from (that is, fission byproducts of) the clan that invented the things in the first place.
Thirdly, there is one HUGE difference between the Dylaarian system and that of 2000-era Earth. Corporations can cheaply and easily merge and acquire one another. A corporation can buy up other corporations and effectively 'consume' them in order to obtain their patents. This leads to great fragmentation (since so many large corporations have been buying up all kinds of random individual patents on all kinds of things), and it also leads to situations where a single entity can hold thousands of patents on widely disparate things.
A Dylaarian clan probably can't just "buy out" another clan to obtain its patents. Merging clans may be possible, but it would be rare and would never be as complete a process as "Ogoco bought Sillycorps and now owns every patent Sillycorps had, perfectly simple." This tends to make the process a bit simpler and more discrete, in that there are clans that specialize in specific things. When they run into a problem they can't handle in-house or a use of their technolgoy they can't afford to develop, they
HAVE out outsource it by leasing the patent rights.
Nobody can afford to 'hoard' patent rights past a certain point, because no single clan can get large enough to fully exploit the patent on a basic fundamental technology. If you try to just sit on it and make eleventy gazillion dollars by forcing everyone to use your patent, sooner or later one of your relatives will come to you and suggest splitting the clan (and the enormous profits). You have to share the patent rights out among your clan's descendants, if no one else.
This leads me to think about just how this system evolved from previous systems. As
@AKuz noted, it probably grew out of other ideas that are superficially similar but different in detail. Sort of like how Earthly concepts of land ownership grew out of older concepts of land ownership.
For example, in feudal Europe where nobles were the ones who really 'owned' land, and were legally entitled to enforce laws on their land
because they owned it. Go to Europe nowadays and that's not true; ownership of a piece of land no longer entails the right to set the legal code which applies
on that land. And the converse is also true (the government being able to tell you what you can and cannot do with your land doesn't mean you don't own it or can't sell it). Likewise, it may be that at some point in the past of the Dylaarian species, cultures would say that whoever held the rights to a particular industrial practice had the sole power to regulate it- but over time that changed.
This can be added seamlessly to my idea, on which more below.
...
Perhaps this system evolved out of some kind of
caste system, originally, in which there were specific castes of people who did specific types of job.
However, the caste system allowed for adoption or movement from one caste to another, so that the
de facto status of the castes was that of semi-hereditary trade unions. This provided a social safety valve that prevented the caste system from becoming the target of revolutionaries; it's hard to build up much resentment against a system that lets you move if you really feel motivated to do so.
Since time immemorial, it was
of course customary for castes that engaged in a skilled trade to adopt and develop trade secrets. Furthermore, the castes tended to fission along regional lines (because this was a pre-industrial society and transportation was hard). Also along lines of closely related subcrafts (barrel-makers, house-building carpenters, furniture-making carpenters, wheelwrights, etc.) However, the individual clans that made up these castes retained strong ties to one another and these ties provided them with legally accepted status in Dylaarian communities. At least, in the parts of the planet ancestral to their dominant planetary culture of today, that's what happened.
Now, on Earth, the idea of semi-hereditary craft unions basically got obliterated by the rise of capitalism, because the new technologies in machinery and metalworking and so on were owned by individual investors who simply ignored the question "well, what are you doing to the livelihood of all those blacksmiths?" Due to the way that the legal systems worked in the dominant planetary culture of Dylaar, that wasn't possible, for whatever reason.
So imagine that some monocle-wearing giant gecko of the Dylaarian equivalent of the 18th century decided to build a huge industrialized ironworks that used totally new principles. Thing is, the Association of Blacksmith Sub-Castes or whatever
successfully challenged that Dylaarian capitalist in court, pointing out that while she might own the idea of heating the iron in a crucible in such and such a way, she
clearly did not own the concept of "melting iron to do such and such."
Someone wants to build a railroad? Well
clearly the Guild-Clan-Thing of Coal Miners can show prior art in that they've been using carts on rails to transport coal for centuries. You're just scaling up the concept, which is
great and all... but either you have to share the profits with them, or you have to apply to be adopted into their clan. While paying off the Animal Drovers' Clan-Caste-Guild-Thing, who are the only ones who are entitled to drive the oxen-equivalents that pull the carts.
Oh, you built a machine that does an ox's job? Great! But you
still have to pay the Drovers' Clan-Caste-Whatever, because they own the idea 'hitch this to that to make this go.' Or something.
The result of this is that the Dylaarian equivalent of the Industrial Revolution wound up being modulated through the pre-existing system. The legal basis of "own the rights to ideas" would have changed drastically during this time, of course. But there are some positive side effects. For instance, the capital/labor divide as we know it would be greatly reduced, because turning investment capital into a successful business has to be modulated through a large clan. You can outcompete a rival steelworking clan, but it's a lot easier to join them with your superior modifications to their old technique, as compared to trying to beat them with it.
The adoption mechanism means that people tend to gradually shift away from clans that are shrinking and lack resources, into clans that have them. I imagine that there were a LOT of people who abandoned the Farmer Caste-Clan-Alliance-Guild-Thing during the Dylaarian version of the 19th and early 20th centuries, and were adopted into craft clans. But within each clan the atmosphere is kind of like a worker's co-op; the entire population of the clan is, so far as possible, involved in making the clan's key IP rights and ideas into a success.
There would almost certainly be a recognizable government, with associated clans descended from the castes that used to govern the system. However, about the only patents these groups would hold are those directly related to administration... And yet they have a lot of influence and power because it's agreed upon that they're the ones who oversee important concepts like "jail" and "taxes." They're also the ones who are arbitrating most of the patent disputes that cannot be settled amicably.
Lateral movement into and out of these clans is possible,
if it's what you want, and
if you're acceptable to them. Presumably, the society would tend to evolve to permit lateral movement at a rate that causes things not to fall apart, or the
parts of society where it doesn't would tend to falter compared to other parts that do.
It honestly might take these guys a long time to get their act together and get into space, but I think it's possible. Especially if you remember that the clans which own the ideas are
not the same as the pure-profit corporate entities that tend to own important ideas on Earth.
