An Open Letter from Jeff Bezos on the Subject of Patents (2000)
archive.oreilly.com
archive.oreilly.com
It would incent companies to focus on core inventions, instead of filing 20-year lottery tickets.
Patent value to trolls would be greatly reduced, lowering the incentive for nuisance lawsuits. (Companies can continue to file new patents as they continue to innovate).
It would increase the incentive for universities to commercialize ("get moving before the patent expires!").
In Jefferson's day, when information and innovation moved much more slowly, a 14yr patent period (now 20 in the US) made more sense. Today, it just means the set of in-force patents diverges wildly from the leading edge of innovation.
If done right -- and it could take 2 years or more -- we'll end up with a patent system that produces fewer patents (fewer people will bother to apply for 3 or 5 year patents, and fewer patents means less work for the overworked Patent and Trademark Office), fewer bad patents (because of the pre-issuance comment period), and even the good patents won't last longer than is necessary to give the innovator a reasonable return (at Internet speed, you don't need 17 years).
In Canada, for instance, federal government's patent policy research apparatus is essentially two people. Two.
Additionally, the epistemic academic work required to provide a proper critique of the industry is not well funded by public or private sources. On the private side, most interested parties are incentivized to be patent maximalists, while on the public side, applicants are basically pitching an argument to the legal academy that indicates that their central dogmas are so tremendously wrong so as to be unjust.
Additionally, the issues caused by a lack of patent reform are not acutely felt by the majority of individuals or industries, which means the benefit is concentrated while the pain is distributed. Representation at industry forums, accordingly, is slanted.
In the pharmaceutical space, for instance, WIPO had no issue with crushing access to medicine until there was a global outcry, and patted itself on the back when they introduced access provisions, despite themselves admitting the provisions were basically unused after four years following their introduction because the local industries and talent that they presumed were already dead and gone.
TL;DR: No inertia.
That being said, the system is clearly broken.
Two suggestions i have is to shorten software patents to 10 years and adjust the length of a patent based on the financial capability of the filer (eg pegged to inflation). The other thing is that filing for a patent should not be so expensive because of the lawyer, it's just ludicrous. If the lawyer can be removed via a combination of software and policy changes (either pubic efforts, private efforts or both), then people will be able to pay significantly more for examination. For small inventors, a "slow lane" that is significantly cheaper can be allocated. Another idea is anonymous (for the filer) crowd sourced prior art search with incentives.
It's not worthy of protection to the person who got there first. It's just not, it's ridiculous.
He could have said "you're right, this is ridiculous" and just given up the patent 20 years ago.