I don't think that will help a whole lot... There are some uses for non-practicing entities (eg, groups of patent holders like the MPEG LA doesn't do anything b

I don't think that will help a whole lot... There are some uses for non-practicing entities (eg, groups of patent holders like the MPEG LA doesn't do anything but it'd be impossible for anyone to licence an H.264 decoder without them because you'd have to get licences for hundreds of individual patents from a whole lot of other companies instead). We need to get to the source of the problem, which is that most software patents are either too vague or are for obvious things, and the term of protection is far too long.