That way you don't have to pull the carpet from under drug companies and suchlike, or 'burn down the entire house'. Just the rotten parts of it.
ARM, MIPS, and many research universities would count as non-practicing entities. As they are, they only produce "intellectual property", and sell licenses to it to fund their operations. They would be forced to find an alternative business model. Universities have alternative funding sources, and they might not be affected too heavily.
Whether this is a good or a bad thing is open to debate, but it's clear to me that non-practicing entities that produce valuable results do exist.
But I guess the real problem isn't whether the patents usually involved will hold up in court, but the costs involved in setting up a defense and disproving the accusations.
How about: more than 50% of your employees are lawyers, or the lawyers in your organization make more than 50% of the money (to prevent a few lawyers from "hiring" a dozen or so highschoolers at minimum wage.
Patents should protect engineers, not lawyers.
I'm of the opinion that two measures will help fix the patent system, and this applies to most fields.
First, the duration of patents needs to be cut. 5 or so years would probably suffice.
Second, there needs to be an incentivized prior art busting effort. Perhaps the party filing the patent could put $1000 or so into escrow for a 1 month waiting period, and if someone manages to find valid prior art, they get the money.
Another thing that could help a lot is minimizing the extent to which patents can be sold. One of the biggest problems with the patent system that I see is that someone can invent something that sounds worthless, sell the patent for $10,000, and then the company that buys the patent can rake in millions in royalties. In general no one should be making money hand over fist for things that they neither invented nor produce.
Or only make accreditation for those non-practicing entities that purchased the IP rather than inventing it.