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Comment by nine_k | Hacker News Reader

(Repeating for umpteenth time:) I wish patent fees were exponential. Pay $10 the first year, $40 the second year, $160 the third year,.. $10,485,760 the tenth year, etc. The patent expires and goes to public domain the first year when the fee has not been not paid.

This way there'd be enough time to commercialize an invention for basically peanuts, so the small guy won't be dissuaded from doing so. OTOH holding on a patent for a very long time would only be possible if it brings gobs of money, end even so, only for a reasonably limited time, because on 15th year the fee would be $10,737,418,240.

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The inevitable result of this will be spamming the system with basically-the-same patents every year. This article lists the cost to fight patents at $6,000 to $75,000 for each patent. It’ll be hard for small players to adversarially strike down 3,000 self-similar patents every year which block real innovation.

Yes, the patent office should do a better job of understanding their areas of expertise and prior art. In absence of that, perhaps the patent fees could go to a revenue-neutral system where successfully overturning patents as a private citizen results in getting a share of the total pool of filing and renewal fees.

Just deny the same patents and put a exponential fee for resubmitting if found to be the same patents.

The cure for the spam problem is to turn the incentives around in the patent examination process. Make it highly adversarial from the go and reward the patent office staff for rejecting applications, with solid argument trails. A good part of that would be to have the applicants submit their researched potential prior art and PROVE that their patent is actually novel. (If they haven't submitted a clearly discoverable piece of prior art and the examiner finds that out, that's an immediate rejection. With extreme prejudice, and preferably multiplied rejection award.)

It would still be gameable (everything is), but it would certainly curb the flood of copycat "X-but-in-domain-Y" patents once the pool of prior art used to reject crummy patents becomes better known and established. The additional pool of rejected applications then also feeds into the prior art foundations.

This is an excellent idea. I would still limit the time though. Also inflation should be taken into account (maybe) not that in 10 years 10M dollars is a chocolate.

Thanks! The idea is not mine :)

I think that the exponent grows so fast that it completely dwarfs normal inflation. If the inflation goes out of hand, Zimbabwe-style, then I won't expect patent enforcement to matter or work either. But well, a term like 15-20 years could be added just in case.

This is actually a ... solid idea upon short consideration!

I like it! Thank you for posting it: I hadn't seen it before.

Why not make it so there is a limit to how many patents you can hold? So if you have 10 patents, to register an 11th patent you need to release one of the patents you already have.

Who is "you"? The company? The subcompany? The CEO? Each individual employee? Patsy #1281?

Pointless as you could easily diversify by having your family members be official patent holders

That still seems pretty easy to game by re-filing slight variations of the original patents

Won't these be invalidated by having prior art already in public domain?

That would only protect those variations, not the previously published original version. And if the variations are too obvious you could even challenge their patents with a good chance of overturning them (which brings us back to the issue of the legal system being too slow and expensive)

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