I don't think there is such a name. But you're on the right track about it being difficult to distinguish between value and rent-seeking.
One thing to note is that governments themselves are, by definition, rent-seekers. This is inherent to how a government - a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence within an area - works. Once you are sovereign within a territory you can extract rents in the form of taxes, and if you don't extract enough you will be deposed by someone who does.
Most governments also tend to encourage their own industries to rent-seek as well. If your country needs heavy industry or scientific research or cultural behemoths, it's far easier and politically defensible to construct new narrow property regimes (e.g. copyright, patents, PDOs, etc) for those companies to exploit rather than just paying them subsidies. These regimes can be selectively weakened when you need to build your industry domestically (what the US did to the UK, or what China did to the US) and then strengthened later when you need to protect it internationally (what the US forced into WIPO).
Very little of capitalism is actually adding value, in the sense that you have a business that hires people, buys materials, and turns them into goods and services at a prevailing market rate. At the lowest rungs of the chain, sure - you might have, say, petite-borgeouis crustaceans hiring workers to cook food and sell it to people who need it. But that's not where most of the actual profit is. Compare that to, say, a fast-food franchise; which doesn't usually run any restaurants or sell any food. They instead sell trademark rights and supplier relationships. In particularly egregious systems like McDonalds, they even rent their franchisees the land that the restaurant must be housed in.
Left-wing critiques of capitalism are typically extra-cynical about this, and would consider even the small profit Mr. Krabs makes on burgers to be rent, not value. This is usually in the context of the employee-business relationship, however; not the business-customer one. Small businesses generally don't extract a premium on the goods or services they sell just because they're the only company that happens to own a stove or know some secret recipe. But in the context of employees, they are getting paid less for their labor, albeit in exchange for not having to bear up-front capital costs or deal with inconsistent revenue. Whether or not this constitutes rent or value is most likely a political opinion, not something that you could actually devise some economic criteria for.
Excluding the direct political arguments, is there hope for a clean way to distinguish these types of activities:
* Someone who literally figures out a new, cheap way to make a drug which cures a real disease
* Someone who, as soon as they get the right to, imposes license fees which serve no valid purpose, and profits in status & wealth from these new duties.
No, because they're the same thing. We pay for inventions with rent seeking behavior. One person's justified license fees are another person's patent or copyright trolling.
The original idea with these sorts of things, at least in the US, is that we'd have administrative procedures and court adjudication to limit the harm that could come from that behavior. In practice, the administrative procedures are only a bar to the least knowledgeable plaintiffs, and the mere threat of litigation over a marginally valid claim is often enough to coerce most defendants into a settlement. Nobody wants to actually litigate whether or not a patent is obvious, or a copyright owner has been surreptitiously seeding their own works on BitTorrent.
There's also a question about whether or not your two examples are, in practice, always different cases. What if the person in the first example decides to not license their drug at all, so they can do the manufacturing themselves and control the price? That would be identical behavior to the second example... but they still made a useful invention. They're the same person.
You could legally restrict "non-practicing entities" from enforcing patent rights, but that's only a subset of all rent-seeking patent owners. Remember: the entire point of the system is to enable rent-seeking in lieu of up-front payments.
Rent-seeking is when profits massively outstrip investment. Perhaps infeasible in practice, but if government protection of licenses (patents, even copyright) could be capped at a maximum that's proportional to money & time invested, rent-seeking could become less of a problem.
As in, allow entities to make a handsome profit, far outstripping their original investment. Just don't allow them to profit off of it forever. Patent and copyright expirations are a proxy for this, but they don't take into account the actual money & time invested, instead they replace them with a hard-coded magic number which will work for some products and fail for others.
Sure, it'd be a matter of simplifying the law code and posting everyone's financial information for everyone to have access to.
In other words, once it becomes feasible to 'follow the money', it'll be somewhat trivial to see who's doing what and to what ends.
Notice that this problem doesn't exist in smaller communities, because everyone knows what everyone else is up to.
This is a data access problem that persists because it is profitable for people who have the power to keep everyone else in the dark regarding their machinations.
One thing to note is that governments themselves are, by definition, rent-seekers. This is inherent to how a government - a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence within an area - works. Once you are sovereign within a territory you can extract rents in the form of taxes, and if you don't extract enough you will be deposed by someone who does.
Most governments also tend to encourage their own industries to rent-seek as well. If your country needs heavy industry or scientific research or cultural behemoths, it's far easier and politically defensible to construct new narrow property regimes (e.g. copyright, patents, PDOs, etc) for those companies to exploit rather than just paying them subsidies. These regimes can be selectively weakened when you need to build your industry domestically (what the US did to the UK, or what China did to the US) and then strengthened later when you need to protect it internationally (what the US forced into WIPO).
Very little of capitalism is actually adding value, in the sense that you have a business that hires people, buys materials, and turns them into goods and services at a prevailing market rate. At the lowest rungs of the chain, sure - you might have, say, petite-borgeouis crustaceans hiring workers to cook food and sell it to people who need it. But that's not where most of the actual profit is. Compare that to, say, a fast-food franchise; which doesn't usually run any restaurants or sell any food. They instead sell trademark rights and supplier relationships. In particularly egregious systems like McDonalds, they even rent their franchisees the land that the restaurant must be housed in.
Left-wing critiques of capitalism are typically extra-cynical about this, and would consider even the small profit Mr. Krabs makes on burgers to be rent, not value. This is usually in the context of the employee-business relationship, however; not the business-customer one. Small businesses generally don't extract a premium on the goods or services they sell just because they're the only company that happens to own a stove or know some secret recipe. But in the context of employees, they are getting paid less for their labor, albeit in exchange for not having to bear up-front capital costs or deal with inconsistent revenue. Whether or not this constitutes rent or value is most likely a political opinion, not something that you could actually devise some economic criteria for.