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Comment by flohofwoe | Hacker News Reader

> Patents worked fine 100 years ago, when there were fewer of them.

I don't think it's about the number of patents. In the distant past, patents were intended to allow individual inventors to monetize their invention for some time by selling licenses to companies.

Today, patents are mostly used as a weapon in corporate warfare and by patent trolls to extort money from companies, both a complete perversion of the original idea.

Not sure if it is possible to return to (and enforce) this original intent of protecting the individual inventor, but if not we should just get rid of the whole broken patent system in general.

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You can: increase the price for patenting something. Google will think twice before spending 100K for hello world. Patent trolls you'll always have, but you need to reduce them.

The system has to become again "healthy" to foster real innovation and competition, not a garbage bin to block each others.

That would make it impossible for the 'archetypical' individual inventor working in their garage or basement (if those actually still exist) to get a patent on their invention though.

Maybe companies shouldn't be allowed to own a patent. If a patent is always owned by the original inventors (so it moves with them if they change jobs, and any patent license fees always go to the inventors), it would help. But I guess there's always loopholes in such simplistic ideas ;)

> if those actually still exist)

That's what I fear is not the case anymore. And I am not sure we're getting back there. With so many regulations in all industries, it has become impossible to innovate from your home. Unless you really want to patent BS like big companies do, which is ugly...

It sucks, but that's how it has become.

If you want to protect such minorities, you can offer them a discount, but make it clear indeed that the patent belongs to the individual for even longer, not to the company.

Doing nothing as it has been until now certainly doesn't help.

> You can: increase the price for patenting something. Google will think twice before spending 100K for hello world.

This is a terrible idea. Google will not think twice before spending 100k for a patent on hello world, but startups and small businesses would be priced out of the patent system entirely. All this would do is further increase and entrench the power of large corporations to the detriment of startups, entrepreneurs, SMBs, and ultimately, consumers.

My suggestion is to double the fees every year so that only patents will be kept which really generate relevant economic returns.

My suggestion is 1000 USD in year 1.

After 10 years the fee is 1m USD per year.

After 20 years the fee is 1bn USD per year.

The current schedule of 23 years aligns nicely with this. If a Pharma patent is really generating billions of returns then maybe it would be worth for the company to pay 8 bn USD fees in year 23.

patents should be like 10 years max on any account in my opinion. You shouldn't have to wait a generation for one to expire.

If the system worked at all, an inventor could still make money selling IP weapons to corporations.

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