Not in principle; but the current practice of accepting highly dubious patents with little or no scrutiny is only serving the least innovative companies.
The fix would be to make it more expensive to defend a patent and cheaper to challenge one instead of the current practice of flooding the system with dubious patents knowing full well that challenging them is prohibitively expensive and the scrutiny from patent offices is minimal. When companies exists whose sole purpose is accumulating and exploiting such patents for profit with absolutely 0$ budget for R&D, something is deeply wrong.
The fact that some judges seem to be unwilling to actually lift a finger to do anything about such companies is not helping either. E.g. Texas seems to be a preferred venue for patent extortion where patent trolls and judges pretty much openly work together. Some call this justice, I call it institutionalized corruption. Plain and simple. Maybe no money changes hands but it seems corporations are actively putting their fingers on the scales when it comes to electing judges into very lucrative jobs and everybody understands there's a quid pro quo. Just putting a stop to that would be helpful. Something is deeply wrong when shady companies can just buy "justice" like that.
This would incentivize companies to file better patents and only file those patents that they are actually willing to defend as opposed to filing numerous patents opportunistically in the hope that smaller competitors will settle out of court and pay a license fee rather than risking bankruptcy through the courts. This also would free up patent offices to actually do their job properly as opposed to dealing with a never ending flood of largely BS patents. Rejection rates ought to be much higher than they currently are.
Set a cap on the number of patents issued each year. Like 500, max, across all industries. Or set a limit of 10,000 active patents, with new ones only accepted as old ones expire. If you want a chance at a patent you file with the PTO (under NDA, in case the patent isn't granted) for a nominal processing fee and at the end of the year the best 500 are selected from the perspective of "most useful disclosure of information", "least likely to be reverse-engineered or independently reinvented", and "lowest cost to the public in being restricted from freely implementing the patented invention for the next 20 years".
Variations: Let the filer pick the duration of the patent, with a shorter duration improving the odds of being selected (lower cost to the public). Or replace the monopoly with a one-time cash payout to make the invention freely available for the public to implement immediately.
The fix would be to make it more expensive to defend a patent and cheaper to challenge one instead of the current practice of flooding the system with dubious patents knowing full well that challenging them is prohibitively expensive and the scrutiny from patent offices is minimal. When companies exists whose sole purpose is accumulating and exploiting such patents for profit with absolutely 0$ budget for R&D, something is deeply wrong.
The fact that some judges seem to be unwilling to actually lift a finger to do anything about such companies is not helping either. E.g. Texas seems to be a preferred venue for patent extortion where patent trolls and judges pretty much openly work together. Some call this justice, I call it institutionalized corruption. Plain and simple. Maybe no money changes hands but it seems corporations are actively putting their fingers on the scales when it comes to electing judges into very lucrative jobs and everybody understands there's a quid pro quo. Just putting a stop to that would be helpful. Something is deeply wrong when shady companies can just buy "justice" like that.
This would incentivize companies to file better patents and only file those patents that they are actually willing to defend as opposed to filing numerous patents opportunistically in the hope that smaller competitors will settle out of court and pay a license fee rather than risking bankruptcy through the courts. This also would free up patent offices to actually do their job properly as opposed to dealing with a never ending flood of largely BS patents. Rejection rates ought to be much higher than they currently are.