How about requiring patent-holders to show progress on their invention every X years, so that inventors can't just sit on an old and important patent they own?
Or, a more ground-up restructuring: what if owning a patent didn't give you full ownership of the technology, but just X% of profit made from it for X years after filing?
With this setup, you could further incentivize progress by granting an additional X% to the first one able to bring the technology to market.
The latter is called "working the patent", which is the opposite of what patent predators, née trolls do. Apparently some countries require holders to work the patent, and I'm a big supporter of fundamental patent reform in the US that would require people/corporations to produce and sell the invention in order to maintain a patent. That would almost vaporize all the patent predators out there.
Right now we have a system where you can just think shit up and write it down. Boom, you've got a patent (with the help of a lawyer usually). That's a ridiculous legal system. The system should be designed around actual market activity – the introduction of innovative products. I think it's an important right that someone who invents something should have exclusive commercial rights to it for a while, but not a right to just sit back and stop other people from using their brains too.
Your percentage of profits idea is something I liked for a while when I was thinking a lot about reform, but I now think that it would be way too hard to enforce. It would be such a mess to carve out exactly what the profit or revenue was that could be attributed purely to some part of a product that hinged on some dude's patent, along with all the other encumbered parts and features. It would be worse than the mess that is the income tax and corporate income tax.
You could just do a general per industry tax, which I proposed here a few years ago: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/openmanufacturing/vS4ju1VqXb...
I would much rather see a large patent fee with annual inflation indexing for the patent holder. If it costs you 1 million USD each year to hold a patent, then you only acquire one for major, truly revolutionary ideas that will easily recoup that money. It's a sum that can easily be fitted in the budget of any significant research and development program, yet prohibitive for most submarine, defensive, or warchest IP operations.
A large anual fee forces you to "work" the patent, either directly or by licensing it. If you are not sure if your "idea" is valuable, then you don't deserve a patent.
In a (strained) sense, that's already what the USPTO is doing. Except it's also associated with all this technology innovation stuff, which we would like them to stay away from.
> If you are not sure if your "idea" is valuable, then you don't deserve a patent.
I'll have to play around with that idea.
Compulsory licenses fill this gap preventing patents from being used to inhibit development.