Does anybody know why it costs a fee to submit a patent? Wouldn't it be much more fair to small inventors if we could just submit a patent for free, and the moment we'd like to exert that patent in a court, we'd pay for its examination?
No, since the whole point of that patent system is to have these examined, reviewed, and notice publicly provided so that people can do business without having to resort to litigation (sure, with the implicit threat of litigation in the background, but examination and patent grants are supposed to provide a degree of clarity.)
Admittedly, that process doesn't work well in all too many cases, but it would make the system orders of magnitude worse if instead of having an in-advance examination process we just had a series of patent applications hanging around waiting for litigation to start to provide an excuse for them to be examined.
Why exactly? For whom?
Because it magnifies the lack of clarity problems in the current poor examination process which both makes litigation between market participants in comparable positions more likely and makes market players with less resources more compelled to knuckle under to those with more because they can't afford the risk of litigation. The greater clarity is provided in advance, the less uncertainty/risk is involved in litigation, which both makes litigation less common and reduces coercion of market participants by those more able to afford risky litigation.
> For whom?
Pretty much everyone, though less for the richest players in the market and the patent lawyers.
Small entity filing fees aren't too bad.
Back of the envelope numbers: you might save 50% of the current costs of obtaining a patent. It'd still be far from free.
With this construct, an inventor could go to e.g. Google, and sell them this idea ("potential patent"). This way, small inventors wouldn't need to have a big pile of cash just to secure their ideas.
The idea of the patent is (at leas in part) to protect inventor's investment. When someone spent significant effort researching and prototyping some useful device, it makes sense to pay a small sum for its legal protection from copycats.
If someone just stumbled upon an idea, without any plans to use it for profit and without sunk costs that one would like to protect, why grant a patent? Someone else could (and historically did) invent the same thing independently, and put it to actual use. Why impede the efforts of that latter person?
While we're at, it let me remind the idea of exponential patent fees.
A patent should require e.g. $100 to keep for the first year, $400 for the next year, $1600 for the third year, etc, quadrupling the cost each year. If you're on a gold mine like Singer's needle, or Edison's lamp, or a transistor, you have no trouble paying for that patent for 10 or maybe 20 years. If you patented something useful but minor, you can keep it patented as long as it makes financial sense, and then put it to public domain. If you're a NPE patent troll, you're toast in a really short term.