The solution to the patent system is to abolish it. The whole thing. Seek compensation for the act of coming up with innovative ideas instead of trying to apply artificial state granted monopolies to them after the fact. It would be so much healthier to have money pumped into the R&D of common utility goods for the sake of the innovation than to continue to perpetuate patent warfare while trying to attach a flawed profit motive to intellectualism.
The usual retort to that is "so you don't want to cure cancer then". The pharmaceutical industry very strongly depends on patents, and would easily be able to convince government through money and "cancer" not to abolish it.
The practical thing then is to come up with a solution for pharma, and then abolish the patent system.
The patent system is very badly designed for pharma. The cost in pharma is in the clinical trials, but the patent is awarded for creating the drug -- long before the trials.
Rather than being a reward for brining an innovation to market, the monopoly (patent) is awarded long before the bulk of the work has been done. No reward is offered in the patent system for doing the hard and expensive part -- proving efficacy and safety. But the patent means that even if you choose not to spend the money to bring it to market, nobody else is allowed to.
Something like 95% of pharmaceuticals fail to be effective and safe. In other words, 95% of pharmaceutical patents are for inventions that ultimately don't work.
"A patent for something that does not work" ought not be allowed -- the pharmaceutical patent should only be awarded after efficacy and safety has been proved (incentivising the hard part).
What's to stop the FDA enforcing 'patents' and market exclusivity in their approval process? I.e. Instead of approving Chemical-X, approve only DrugCorp brand Chemical-X?
Possibly with some stipulation that the first company to submit and pass approval gets a N-year exclusivity.
Even if we keep patents for Big Pharma alone, they need a serious overhaul because right now they are grossly abusing them, too. It's not just tech companies doing it.
I think this is the right way to go. Short of the argument against patenting math, I think you're hard-pressed to find anything that parallels pharma or hard-goods patents in software.
But with software should go business-process patents, which suffer from the same "patent a way of doing things" problems. Patents do well to cover the result of a process, and shouldn't cover the process itself. In software, you can have two patents end up with the same result, as long as they arrive there by different paths.
With hard goods, you invent inline skates. Someone can't declare another patent arriving at the same result but using a different manufacturing process to create inline skates.
The practical thing then is to come up with a solution for pharma, and then abolish the patent system.
Could pharma companies pay an R&D tax into a shared pool issued as research grants by the NIH, with a quasi-market for allocating research funds? That way non-researching manufacturers of generics still contribute to new drug research -- no freeloading.
Pharma is just the best example. But any industry that involves R&D would be heavily affected.
Why would Qualcomm bother making new designs if some other company will just rip off their design.
All it would do is further weaken the engineers role in society and favor the banker. Without IP, the only thing that matters is capital to build production facilities.
We don't need patents to justify everything. Think of space exploration. No patents are necessary for the government to invest billions of dollars into that industry.
Furthermore, pharmaceutical companies have no incentive to find a real cure for anything if they can make more money fighting symptoms.
Basically the idea is that there are extremely entrenched interests, so it is unlikely that they will just roll over and die. Instead, there should be a plan for deprecating the patent system.
