While empowering patent examiners to say "no" will probably help, it's not going to fix patents. Changes I would make to fix patents: - Get rid of license neg

While empowering patent examiners to say "no" will probably help, it's not going to fix patents. Changes I would make to fix patents: - Get rid of license negotiation before the fact and replace it with attribution after the fact. All patented ideas should compete for a bounded slice of the pie of products. Attribution should be incentivized, but failure to attribute shouldn't be penalized excessively. - Instead of just letting a panel of experts (patent examiners) determine which ideas are novel and which aren't, we should further let them determine how novel they are and award the most novel ideas bigger rewards. The current system of granting a monopoly on an idea allows the patent holder to collect a large potion of the total value of an idea, which would be fair only for ideas that occur to just one person in the world. In reality, almost all patented ideas (the good ones, anyway) occur to a number of bright people, even if they wouldn't occur to a person having ordinary skill in the art. - The patent database should be more like the collection of peer reviewed academic knowledge. Ideas should be rewarded based on impact, rather than just who technically had the idea first. We should reward high quality exposition of ideas instead of our current system that mostly rewards obfuscation. Of course, all of this is even less likely to happen that the idea in the OP. Abolishing patents or at least software patents would be preferable to the system we have now.