I have pretty low faith in USPTO (or, to be fair, any other organization), making reasonable predictions on the technology value. And even if they did, I think inventors would feel low-balled: "those idiots did not understand the revolutionary benefit of my invention", etc.

Rather than trying to estimate the value of the idea we could drastically reduce the time for patent protection. Shortening protection period to 2-5 years should still encourage inventions, but would discourage early carpet-bombing filings (which scare many inventors away) as well as move successful inventions into public domain while they are still relevant. My 2c.

5 years is plenty of time for patenting some clever software trick that took a minute to think up and a week to implement (eg. minigames in loading screens). But some inventions take years or even decades of research (eg in materials science) and, even after being invented, may take a year or more to spool up the production line, let alone the procurement process.

Would it make sense to have the patent office choose the patent length between say 2 to 20 years?

Estimating the value seems pretty much impossible, but estimating a length seems more reasonable. Clever software trick, quick to invent, easy to capitalise -> 2 years. Ground breaking new drug/material with slow market deployment -> 20 years.

There's still some subjectivity involved (but that's already the case with the current patent system), but you could try to base it on some objective metrics.

Or perhaps it could be a fixed duration per field, somehow, so that you know before filing what you will get.

It would be easy to discriminate between 20 years for drugs vs. 5 for anything software, but I guess it's tricky to decide whether something like e-paper should count as fast-moving consumer-facing tech or hard-won physics/chemistry knowledge.

If something is in research phase it should not be patented yet. And once invented, a 5-year protection still gives the inventor a 5-year advantage. If it cannot leverage it effectively, sorry but too bad.

No method is perfect, but I think that in most cases a 5-year protection is enough to encourage invention.

Many products contain hundreds of distinct "inventions" in the patent sense. One can't necessarily hold off on registering a patent for an individual invention for 5 years while the rest of the product is developed, as you'd risk a competitor inventing the same before you have patent protections.

Patent does not protect a product, but a specific technology. If 1 technology out of 10 in a product is under patent protection the competitor (and the public) cannot copy the product as is, but is welcome to use any expired technologies any way it sees fit.

In general, it is a business decision on whether to patent a technology that it is not ready for the production: the risk of not making a product in 5 years vs the risk of competitor getting there first. It is not perfect, but I would prefer that inventions that the owner wants to own (and suppress competition for) but cannot commercialize in 5 years enter public domain. My 2c.

That's kind of what the private market already does, without the PTO's involvement. If people think your patent has value, they can license or or buy rights to it.

No, because if the patent applicant keeps the technology secret, there is no patent. Meaning the road is open for other companies to invent the same technology.

The point of patents is that the invention should be described, and patents are publicly accessible. This is what allows you to discuss infringements in a regular court.

Just to point out, there do seem to be certain (niche) fields where Patents can be kept "secret". eg National Security, Nuclear, (etc) type of things:

https://slate.com/technology/2018/05/the-thousands-of-secret...