Patents in general and as originally intended are beneficial: the concept was created to incentivise publishing innovations, to promote progress and state of th

Patents in general and as originally intended are beneficial: the concept was created to incentivise publishing innovations, to promote progress and state of the art. Patents in software space are an abomination. The solution is actually easy, and AFAIK has been at one time in the books too. Require a physical prototype with the submission. But I would go further. We should also require that the information in the patent, and any publicly available resources it references are together sufficient to replicate the prototype build. If the rebuild cannot produce the same results as the application claims, then the entire application is invalid. (This limits the incentive for patent claims to be overly broad.) Want to patent a process improvement? Fine, submit the description, the claims, the prototype implementing the improvement - and the accurate build instructions to replicate the design. Think your setup would be too costly due to the requirement of the physical prototype? Works as intended: now you have an extra incentive to improve the invention to the point where it is actually useful and cost-effective. And if the cost of submission due to prototype requirement prevents you from submitting for a patent in the first place? Excellent, the cost of entry is already high enough. Now you have to keep innovating to maintain your competitive edge, because there is no patent moat to prevent competition in an obviously expensive, potentially high-margin field. The last one may sound like a weird one, but it serves a very specific purpose. You are allowed to keep trade secrets, but if you choose not to patent them and your competition does (because they figured out a more cost-effective way of doing it), then you just got what you deserved. And the final nail in the coffin of overbroad patents would be to turn the patent office incentives around. Make the rejection of an application be financially the most beneficial result. Allow resubmissions, but make them exponentially more expensive, so companies can't just bombard the patent office with junk.