I don't have a definitive answer to how to fix patents or software patents but I'm pretty sure that patents must somehow be coupled to economical counterweights. What I do know is that it's way too cheap to obtain patents and walk waving them around.
There should be a cost of ownership involved that is somehow relative to the gains from the patent and its value. Patent troll companies exist because it's too cheap and easy.
I can't imagine the details but ideally this cost would direct companies to only consider patenting ideas that would exhibit an actual novelty and also a reasonable profitability expectations. This would validate both the new and useful aspects.
Filing patents the conveyor belt way would be too expensive and even if given the money, filing patents without merit wouldn't yield profits. I don't know how to link merit and money, and I don't know how to not exclude small players from the market but cost has notoriously a pretty good chance of keeping things in some control.
Patents are both too cheap and too expensive. Too cheap for capitalized trolls, and too expensive for individual inventors.
Clearly the problem is that the novelty clause is not being enforced in any meaningful capacity.
The deeper problem of course, is that a hundreds-year-old institution is just incapable of dealing with the concept of software. The pace of development is orders of magnitude faster, and the cost is orders of magnitude lower than the type of innovation that patent law was originally designed for.
Imagine if you came up with a particularly clever idea in software and you got two years exclusivity to capitalize on it, assuming that the patent application included the actual code. If the novelty were properly enforced, I can imagine how such a system could offer an incentive to innovate and provide "open source" code to the world at large.
Of course I don't have any faith that the bureaucrats have the capacity to make such a thing happen, so honestly we're better off without software patents entirely.
There should be a cost of ownership involved that is somehow relative to the gains from the patent and its value. Patent troll companies exist because it's too cheap and easy.
I can't imagine the details but ideally this cost would direct companies to only consider patenting ideas that would exhibit an actual novelty and also a reasonable profitability expectations. This would validate both the new and useful aspects.
Filing patents the conveyor belt way would be too expensive and even if given the money, filing patents without merit wouldn't yield profits. I don't know how to link merit and money, and I don't know how to not exclude small players from the market but cost has notoriously a pretty good chance of keeping things in some control.