There are solutions, it just takes the political will. The patent office is funded through patent fees and appears to suffer no consequence for issuing bad patents. So the patent office seems to be encouraged to keep issuing patents good or bad…
They are increasingly expensive, with the 11.5 year fee being $7700.
You could raise these fees, but how are you going to set them? Based on industry? Ultimately just feels like you’d end up making things harder for individual inventors and easier for big businesses and patent trolls.
Personally I think there are a few reforms that might work. Firstly, software patents do not seem to be useful. They don’t seem to have been required for the development of the software industry, and in general they’ve not been allowed in the past.
Secondly, patents should never prevent the sale or incorporation of a technology into a product. Courts should always demand royalties be paid to the patent holder, based on the profit the infringing party receives.
That’s much more problematic. But it feels like there should be a way to incentivize the continued sale of products so that a company can’t just sit on a patent.
Or maybe a first-sale doctrine that allows a single sale but doesn't allow further sales. You better be sure you want it because once you bought it the resale value is zero? Then troll companies wouldn't be able to sweep up lots of older patents to use in trolling.
Or, it could be like trade marks, of you're not using the patent in a product then you lose it, unless you're the original inventor. If I sell you the patent, then you keep it to troll with you have to make a product that uses it, and sell that product, otherwise the patent expires. It doesn't return to the inventor - they got paid - it enters the public domain.
These ideas are entirely my own and presented for entertainment only.
Nitpick: that’s the exact opposite of the “first sale doctrine”. The first sale doctrine says that, once I buy something, I can do whatever I want with the product. If I want to shoot bullets at a $1000 smartphone for YouTube views, Apple, Samsung, etc. can’t prevent me from doing so.
There are exceptions to this (EULAs and all that), but the general idea is that.
My off-the-cuff proposal would be 'a' first-sale doctrine that would exhaust the rights of an IPR creator by preventing them from being transferred. To a [further] third party. This mirrors 'the' first-sale doctrine.
Of course 'a' first-sale doctrine is just a protocol related to a first transference - in the case you reference that's transference of goods to a consumer, in my proposal the transference was of IPR rights to a manufacturer/troll/company.