[monocasa]

At that point, even the song and dance of 'it helps the little guys protect their ideas from the big corporations' is totally gone. Big corporations can just make it so that small inventors almost never get the capital to develop the invention, so that the corporation can say 'see, he never even attempted to bring the product to market' and develop it on their own with out compensation.

IMO, the whole patent system should just be tore down.

[OtterCoder]

I don't think the wild west will be any friendlier to small inventors than the current techno-dystopia. At least at the moment companies are required to toss a coin at prior art occasionally.