IANAL but I have to imagine that one simple rule would bring back the validity of patents as an innovation protector:
If you have a patent, you MUST have a product or be working on a product using the technology in question or you cannot litigate others using your idea.
Patents are required to protect the truly innovative individuals and groups from huge corporations who can, as you said, just steamroll them and steal ideas.
I'm afraid it will get a lot worse before we finally get this fixed, though.
That rule is easily circumvented. Just write a 10 line python script that references the patent. Release it as MyPatentApp version 1.0 and we're back to litigation square 1.
I believe that in such a quickly changing engineering landscape as software, best way to fix patent troll problem is to make software patents expire in 2-3 years.
So all that would do is require patent trolls to keep around a small development team to mockup wrappers to whatever IP they buy up to show they wrote it?
I suppose the due-diligence requires to disprove shenanigans wouldn't scale and could easily be gamed by reams and reams of "source code" that actually did nothing described in the patent but was sufficiently complex so as to confuse.
This makes me think your approach to expiring them after a short period of time is the right approach to start with.
I've heard an (apocryphal) story about a bubble-gum brand that protected an otherwise unused trade name by manufacturing and selling one stick of gum under that brand each year.
If you have a patent, you MUST have a product or be working on a product using the technology in question or you cannot litigate others using your idea.
That doesn't help in the case where non-innovative patents are used in an anti-competitive manner. Such as the patents Apple is asserting against HTC.
Sure, it may not help in THAT case but it would help with people hoarding patents for the sole purpose of suing others. There isn't going to be a single solution that solves the patent problem. It will be a combination of rules like
1) you must have a product on the market using the patent
2) no business method patents
3) software patents are limited to 2-3 years
etc etc
The problem with "must have product in the market" is the same as with the idea of fixing the domain name system by adding a requirement of "use it or lose it".
Who gets to decide what "having a product in the market" means?
It's impossible to generalize this to an objective set of rules. Thus we'd soon be back on square 1 (read: in the court room).
I don't think this rule is sufficient. Beside the other points people already raised, you still have the issue of people patenting obvious stuff with prior art (like the recent Apple vs HTC case, for example).
Not really. Firstly because not every invention can so easily be produced. What if I patent something to do with space travel? What if it's something that isn't simply a software paradigm? And if it is just something that can be done in software, why not create some semi-working version to prove it's in production? Or are you going to add that it has to sell? Or be appealing? What if you say you have a version for sale but it's a million dollars a unit?
That law is so simple I'm sure there are even more ways to get around it than there are real inventors who will be shafted by it just because they don't own the facilities to produce it enough to satisfy you.
If you have a patent, you MUST have a product or be working on a product using the technology in question or you cannot litigate others using your idea.
Patents are required to protect the truly innovative individuals and groups from huge corporations who can, as you said, just steamroll them and steal ideas.
I'm afraid it will get a lot worse before we finally get this fixed, though.