Program to Determine US Patent Exipration

If patents can't be abolished for now (although I wish they were), they should at least have a much shorter expiration period. You should only be able to keep a patent for 3-5 years, especially if you're not using it in your own products.

A few short years should be enough to recover your R&D cost for just about anything, especially if we're talking about software patents.

It's ridiculous that you can gain money from a very unrelated market 15-20 years into the future, for a very different product.

It took about as much time for the Internet to grow into what it is today. There shouldn't be patents from 15 years ago that can affect Internet's growth today.

And sadly I hear that is what's happening with Apple's win over HTC as well, using patents from 15 years ago that weren't even about smartphones, to stop HTC's Android smartphones.

Patents should absolutely NOT work like that.