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The patent system badly needs fixing, but hasty solutions lead to new problems.

1. If you can't sell a patent, but lack capital or the desire to exploit it (perhaps you have invented something more interesting in the meantime, or alternatively you've developed a serious health condition that prevents you from working), the there's a net economic loss to society because the invention languishes undeveloped for 20 years.

2. You are already required to be able to demonstrate as far as I know. Enforcing this more strictly would allow a different kind of patent trolling by large firms that wanted to grab the inventions of smaller firms/individuals for cheap or nothing by arguing that they weren't sufficiently well resourced to develop the product.

3. If you make patent infringement into an affordable cost of doing business then you're just encouraging people to infringe and pass the minimal costs along to the consumer.

> because the invention languishes undeveloped for 20 years.

This could be fixed. One approach that comes to mind is to require a sub-20-year renewal process that, if not followed, terminates the patent. This might be due to simple non-execution (e.g. patents held by a defunct company, or entities otherwise unable/unwilling to pursue development), failure to pay renewal fees (e.g. you must pay an ongoing lease on your monopoly right), etc.

What's astonishing is the technicality really doesn't change the problem much.

I've been thinking along the same lines as you, but (to play devils advocate and help discussion):

> 1. You should not be allowed to sell a patent. The intent of a patent is to give the inventor(s) enough lead time to develop the idea, not to create a market for ideas.

Why are ideas worth nothing? If I have a breakthrough while researching, I'm screwed unless I also manage to form a company with a production line?

> 2. A patent should not be valid unless you can demonstrate it. You shouldn't be allowed to own ideas that are beyond your means to execute.

Would a prototype be acceptable, or does it have to be viable for production? Also, between coming up with an idea and being able to show it as viable might be a reasonable amount of time

> 3. There should be very low limits on patent infringement damage claims thereby removing the financial incentive of using patents and anti-competitive and extortion weapons.

This one feels the most concerning. If the limits are low, then why would anyone bother following them? You could easily make it cheaper for big companies to copy ideas and run with them, then pay people off when they get caught.

Anything that encourages people who have a new, innovative idea to hide it to try and make money is against the original aim.

I do, in general, like the approach though. Maybe there are points along the way:

1. You have a new, awesome, innovative idea. You can get a patent for it.

2. You have to show some working, or viable prototype within a certain time period (short, a few years maybe)

3. With a real example, you can then get a longer patent.

4. You can sell it, but the original time limit still applies.

This way you're compensated for coming up with great ideas (but you or someone you sell it to has to be able to make it a reality soon) and have to release how things work into the public domain (the original intent of patents).

>Why are ideas worth nothing?

Ideas are worth exactly as much as you can sell them for.

> If I have a breakthrough while researching, I'm screwed unless I also manage to form a company with a production line?

You would be exactly right if you removed "screwed" because it implies that you're entitled to be rewarded for your ideas and not being paid for ideas alone is unfair to you.

You're not entitled to that.

You're not even entitled to be rewarded for actual, hard work (e.g. if you work for a year on software product that fails to sell, you worked hard but that alone doesn't mean someone will give you money because of that).

The problem with patents is that they grant 20 year monopoly on patented ideas and people finally realized that there are very lucrative ways to abuse that monopoly for financial gain, without actually creating any value i.e. if you patent an idea for making an ice cream and don't actually make an ice cream, you can still extract value by suing people who actually do make ice cream, even if they came up with the idea independently, as it usually happens, given that in U.S. alone there are 300 millions of mostly college educated people i.e. a lot of people to come up with ideas.

I have a problem with your first solution: patents can be owned by companies, correct? And companies can be bought and sold, no? Given how many patent trolls are using the patents of now-defunct entities, I don't think that limiting patent sales would help much, unless you go further and say that any company that is merged or acquired by another must give up its patents (which doesn't seem like a good idea).

Another issue with your suggestions: setting arbitrary limits on damages would make patents worthless in protecting truly ground-breaking inventions, like the telephone, for instance.

If you're good at inventing, but not at manufacturing/bringing a product to market, you're out of luck if patents cannot be sold/delegated.

That sounds like a perfect scenario for patent licensing.

Only if you wish to manage the licensing. I'd rather be inventing!

I'd prefer not to manage finances at all, really. If you want to get paid for inventing, patents are just one part of that.

Too lazy to deal with licensing isn't a good reason to eschew patent reform btw.

For sure.

A simpler way would be to just give the USPTO the resources it needs to properly evaluate patents before it. And maybe allow it to go back to developing a backlog if it doesn't have resources to properly examine the patents before it.

You don't specify the "resources"

Usually when people say that, they mean either hiring more people or hiring better people by paying more.

Given the very low quality of granted patents, hiring more of same kind of people won't help. We'll clear backlog but since the percentage quality will remain the same, we'll just get even more bad patents.

Hiring better people seems more plausible but is also naive.

The biggest problem is that patent examiners have bad incentive: they are judged by number of patents accepted. Since a rejected patent can be re-submitted ad infinitum (after slight wording changes), their best strategy is to just accept a patent. I don't know of any negative consequence for patent examiner for just rubber-stamping bad patents (an example of that would be firing people after N patents they've accepted were found invalid by independent re-examination).

The second biggest problem is that the standard for a patent is vague and apparently very low. In theory patent should be novel and non-obvious, in practice (especially in software) they are ideas that a competent people come up with during regular work and not as a result of some year-long R&D process focused on one problem.

Finally, given the amount of patents it's absurd that anyone can actually do a fair job evaluating them. This is not something that scales by adding more bodies because in order to say whether a given patent application is novel, a patent examiner would have to do linear search of all existing patents to make sure that it's not like something that has already been patented (not to mention the prior art requirement). Even if we limit the amount of data by trying to search only on related topics, the search space is still absurdly large. It just cannot be done well, which is why it's done so poorly.

Also, patent claims are, as far as I can tell, nearly indecipherable. I worked on an application for an invention with really helpful, smart, technically literate lawyers, but after it was all put in the form of claims and figures and embodiments and specifications that could be (but are not necessarily?) implemented in digital electronic circuitry, I could barely it -- and it was my own work! Pity the patent examiners who have to make heads or tails of these things!