Patents have suffered a fate similar to something like metrics that have succumbed to Goodhart's law. Patents could've worked somewhat originally, at least in

Patents have suffered a fate similar to something like metrics that have succumbed to Goodhart's law. Patents could've worked somewhat originally, at least in principle, but soon people started gaming the system, rendering the patent system worthless. Except for maybe certain domains patents do not currently host important inventions in the meaningful sense. Especially in software, execution matters much more than the actual idea. And the execution part usually is akin to a trade secret: for example, it's not so much what Google and Amazon do, it's about the mountain of work they did in building all that and also making it scale. That's the non-trivial part that you couldn't replicate even if you read and bought all their patents. A low-hanging fruit of fixing the patent system would be to reduce it to a mere notary service of timestamping ideas. Establishing the patent de facto would require the patent to be defended in courts: this alone would cut down the amount of bogus patents. Defending a complex, vague system would cost a lot of money, balancing the usefulness of gaining a court-verified monopoly on the idea. On the other hand, a simple but truly novel idea would be rather easy to defend, even for a private person. There's no downgrade to the current state of matters: it's not as if the current patent system would allow individual inventors a low-cost way to sue and win big companies trying to abuse their patents already. There are other ways but in any case gains need to be balanced with cost, that's the only way to make people and companies prioritise and valuate the true worth of their ideas. No party is going to spend a lot of money trying to defend a vague patent that was written only to win the first-to-file race and game its coverage within the patent system. They already know it's bollocks.