The current patent system is broken. That does not imply that the right thing is to have no patent system; are we sure that the problem is with the idea instea

The current patent system is broken. That does not imply that the right thing is to have no patent system; are we sure that the problem is with the idea instead of the implementation? Can we talk about what an ideal system would look like instead of saying that what we have now is broken and therefore nothing can work? Isn't debugging broken systems what we're supposed to be good at here? I've tried to come up with a reasonable patch for the current system: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3698637 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3698637 I'm sure that there are problems with it, but at least it's a starting point.