The only thing you've listed above that would change the patent office's incentives are the increased issue fees - which would only encourage them to let more bad patents through. Yes, individual examiners would push back because of their personal liability, but they're really trapped between a rock (their boss) and a hard place (getting sued in the future).
On the other hand, if you made the patent office the target of all the penalties for issuing a bad patent (legal fees, damages, etc.) then they'd take care of examiners themselves (not measuring by patent-processing rate, allowing additional time for aggressive prior art searches and so on).
But in either case, first the patent granting authority needs to be held grossly liable to prevent this rampant abuse, then and only then will subsequent measures be effective.
However, targeting the examiners focuses on the personal responsibilty for their actions. If you institutionalize that responsibility (patent office vs patent examiner) you create a situation where the perpetrator (examiner/boss) hides behind the collective back of the patent office and the taxpayers are again left holding the bag of liability.
A person or a discrete group of persons approved the granting of this right to the applicant (or the denial of freedom to non-applicants). Why should they be absolved of their individual responsibility, for their individual actions?
It's the only stamp I'd use.
This is never going to happen and would be an abusive illegal employment practice if it did.
http://moneyweek.com/how-to-become-a-lloyds-name-42723/
However, the inevitable Black Swann event caused changes even in that very high risk system...
"Historically, Names had unlimited liability to the risks they were underwriting. In the late 1980s/early 1990s, Lloyd’s entered the most traumatic time in its history. Unexpectedly large legal awards in US courts on asbestos, pollution and health hazard policies (APH) served up huge losses to many Names, a large number of whom lost their shirts. Names’ numbers dropped from over 30,000 to below 10,000."
I think just giving patent examiners enough time and resources to actually verify the claims would probably cut down a lot of the problem. That and a specialised court like
http://www.justice.gov.uk/courts/rcj-rolls-building/patents-...
instead of a general purpose district court sitting with a lay jury
i.e:
* for each patent filed, one should provide an 'expanse clause' of the R&D expanses
* if one file a patent then those expanses became taxable (the same way warehouse stock is?)
* when applying one can choose to hold the patent for a limited some of years (say 5) WITHOUT dependeing on ROI, OR hold the patent untill ROI exced 10 fold but no longer then 10 years. (number cand depend on general public priorities {medical , novelty , etc.} )
* the 'expanse clause' should be limited to what R&D that is strongly tied with the current patent, but can include failed R&D as long as they are strongly tied to the successed one.
* patent must reach a working implementation within the 1st year of filing, or they are revoked.
* maybe have two types of patents: - one like the above for those with working implementation, - the other for 'consept patents' that have a fix price for filing, and can be held for up to 12 months before one must file a 'regular patent' with a working implementation, and if faild to do so, it is revoked retroactivly so it can be used to sue.
[*] P.S. not a native english speaker, so commetns on grammer and spelling mistakes are actually welcome.
expanse -> expense
1. Make patent applications free of cost, so anyone can play unless they start clogging up the system.
2. Applicants must wait 2^n days between applications, where n is the applicant's number of rejected applications within the past 1,000 years. Non-human persons must be at least 1 year old before applying.
3. Examiners are paid approximately the nation's median income, but also receive rights to 1% of license fees for patents they approve. If an approved patent is ever overturned in court, the examiner is fired and loses all future royalties for any other patents they approved. Those royalties then go to the patent office. Budget surpluses go toward scientific research or maybe education grants.
4. Patents assigned to biological human inventors expire after 20 years. Others expire after 5 years.
Patents are ideas... if you can think of it... so can someone else.
Patents were intended to protect someone's investment into an idea. Today, they just serve as cash cows.
With no patents, a company would be forced to continuously innovate and stay ahead of the curve -- which would replace their patent warchest with a warchest of talented individuals and innovators instead.
Clearly the system is broken to the point that people patent anything just so they can sue others who meet the general ideology of the patent. Clearly this is not what the spirit of patenting was designed for. A system overhaul is more appropriate than to rid all patents.
What is your evidence for this statement?
It's childish to believe that patents are not necessary?
Also, highly impractical.
The entire idea of capitalism is to have fierce competition between companies -- patents, by design, allow one company to innovate once, then nobody else can make something similar. That seems, very anti-competitive (and open for abuse as evidenced by today's "patent wars").
If nobody could "squat" on an idea, then instead of innovating once, you would have to continuously innovate to stay in the lead of your industry.
If you need to pay billions of research cost for something that can be immediately copied, you simply don't do the research. There's plenty of cheap more or less useless improvements instead.
We already see that in medicine, where R&D has become so ludicrously expensive for many actually needed drugs that people would rather create a new ED pill.
Capitalism & "free markets" (as if!) fail as a motor of progress, per se. The only thing they're good at is extraction of wealth. That's why we have government regulation in the first place - to direct the efficiencies created by the market place.
How did they get that way? Because of the patent system.
Just look at the PC industry, where the technology is all open and commoditized. Acer, Lenovo, Asus, etc, own the market, nobody makes any real money, and nobody tries to innovate because new designs are easily copied and margins are razor-thin.
The fleet-footed companies you talk about, generate at best, lead compounds. Turning those leads to INDs (investigational new drugs) and then actual "medicine" is totally controlled by the FDA and is a multi-year, multi-million dollar endeavor, that is well beyond the ken of the fleet-footed operators. Many of these drug candidates fail late in the game, after 5-10 years of human trials, sinking the investment of time and effort with them. Meanwhile the patent clock is running and a drug that hits the market has far less than the 20 year patent term to recoup the costs and generate revenue to discover and groom the next life saving drug.
Speaking from personal experience here.
Unpatented drugs can be done. (I'm trying fwiw)
Later, SuperMegaCo will submit a marginally different formulation of the same basic thing, and it'll get approved because they're probably going to win any long expensive court-battles.
(0). Make patent issue fee ridiculously expensive (100k+ ?).
(1). Increase the salaries of every patent examiner to ridiculously high levels, supported by the extremely high fee.
(2). Make every patent examiner personally liable for approving a patent, to the extent of a lien on their personal assets. No bankruptcy allowed (as for student loans).
(3). If any patent is later proved to be carelessly approved, infringing on prior art or broader than it deserved to be, the patent examiner should be held liable and pay damages for every patent they approved that was struck down.
That might help cut down the indiscriminate issuance of patents that should never have been allowed in the first place.