The patent system is getting quite stressed with globalism, a long tail of users and oceans of abstract patents. This means that a patent might hit you faster than you can say opposition. The WTO, EU, US and JP are teaming to fight work loads and raise quality at the same time.
Here are three suggestions on how to fix some more immediate problems:
- A much longer opposition time, since patents are getting harder to categorize and searching is futile to protect your business. Rise the cost of continuations to cover what would otherwise be stopping innovation. The world is no longer just a dozen players that you can track.
- Translate patent grants into private insurances and share the pain of loosing a patent in appeals with your favorite patent office. Patents would of course still have to be registered with governments and courts after being approved from private insurance granting firms.
- Registries must be public and on-line. It's really hard to understand why it's still impossible to search granted patents on the EPO:s search service espacenet.com. We also need better collaboration in finding prior art, so that we do not have to repeat the work of researching against dubious patents over and over again.
We also need to take care legislation and get innovation policy working in order to separate good from bad patents. Thats why Bilski and UPLS/EU-EPLA matters.
/jonas
* See FFII on private insurances.
