the requirement would be more that you need to actively be pursuing the thing you're patenting, instead of simply reserving the idea.Perhaps the patent-holder could be required to maintain a website that shows how to reduce the invention to practice. However, all US patents are already published online, and, by definition, they all show how to reduce to practice. A caveat is that patents can sometimes remain secret for a number of years before being disclosed by the USPTO. Besides that, patents are enforced at least back to their initial filing dates (not their issuing dates), and therefore a company could be working on a product for several years without having any way of knowing that a patent on that product had been applied-for before they started.
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The USPTO does have a method in place for encouraging patent-holders to market their inventions. It is the patent maintenance-fee schedule:
http://robertplattbell.blogspot.com/2007/10/understanding-ma...
U.S. Maintenance fees are progressive, so each successive fee is much more than the previous one. The idea is to encourage inventors to allow their Patents to expire unless they are actually being used. The Government does not want inventors to “sit on” Patents with the hope that maybe somebody will someday infringe, and then they can sue. With the Maintenance Fees, it is “use it or lose it”.
Maintenance Fees are raised periodically along with all other Patent Fees, so it is hard to say exactly what they will be. At the time of this writing (July, 2005) the fees are as follows:
YEAR Large Entity Small Entity
3 Years: $900 $450
7 Years: $2,300 $1,150
11 Years: $3,800 $1,900
If these maintenance fees are not presently doing the job, perhaps they should be raised. How about multiplying the figures above by 1,000? That way, the final maintenance fee for a large entity would be $3.8 million.