When you apply for a patent you have to show plans for producing the thing and and the price per license to give it out (no upper limit so if you want to only produce, set it to $10^24). For every year that you don't produce the thing and nobody licenses it, the officially recorded license price gets halved. For every year that someone does license it or you produce the thing, you get to adjust the price to whatever you want. Thus companies like Lodsys can only hold onto an unused patent for a fixed number of years before it becomes irrelevant.
Obviously the timing is not ideal: a better half-life for an unused patent might need to be adjusted. However, I think there is something to this idea.
Edit: A better way to determine the half-life would be to tie it to the initial price or the price at the time of reduction. Basically, no matter how high you start out, if you are a patent troll, your patent expires in 5 years.
I like the idea of showing financial plans. A patent should encourage innovation and nothing more. I've always thought that the inventors (or patent holders) should be entitled to all proceeds that their invention generates until they've been adequately compensated for the opportunity cost and capital they've risked to bring their idea to market. Capital costs are easy to measure, opportunity costs not so much. But that is captured in what the inventors plan to earn off their invention either through selling it or licensing it, so the patent office can figure out how long a patent would need to be valid in order for the inventors to be properly rewarded. Since a dollar value would be attached to it in that case, any purchase of the patent would probably change the time it takes for the inventors to be made whole.
In any case, 20 years of protection no matter who owns the patent is a terribly stupid idea.
> I've always thought that the inventors (or patent holders) should be entitled to all proceeds that their invention generates until they've been adequately compensated for the opportunity cost
that is worse than what we have now (damages were, until very recently, calculated on 25% of profit from the part of a product that violated a patent)
also, there are already stringent 'use it or lose it' provisions in most jurisdictions - they are easily avoided, and you only need a single state to become 'patent friendly' to screw it all up anyway
No upper limit? Why wouldn't someone set it to $2^1,000,000,000, never produce the thing, it can't be reasonably licensed at that price, and poses the patent for millenia?
If the fixed number of years is longer than the current 20-year limit, this solution is counterproductive.
There's something in this idea, as I've often toiled over the sharp edges, but it's not all there.
Take one of the article's linked examples, the "Linked List" patent [0], what are the requirements in "producing the thing?" Churn out repositories all day that print random indices of random length, linked list? This idea seems hard to enforce on software patents, which tend to be the most disingenuous, along with most UI, UX, and form/material patents. Do I have my OS create trillions of glossy chat bubbles every day, on a large distributed network, to protect my trivial patent?
When you apply for a patent you have to show plans for producing the thing and and the price per license to give it out (no upper limit so if you want to only produce, set it to $10^24). For every year that you don't produce the thing and nobody licenses it, the officially recorded license price gets halved. For every year that someone does license it or you produce the thing, you get to adjust the price to whatever you want. Thus companies like Lodsys can only hold onto an unused patent for a fixed number of years before it becomes irrelevant.
Obviously the timing is not ideal: a better half-life for an unused patent might need to be adjusted. However, I think there is something to this idea.
Edit: A better way to determine the half-life would be to tie it to the initial price or the price at the time of reduction. Basically, no matter how high you start out, if you are a patent troll, your patent expires in 5 years.