[robocat]

> That ties the duration of a patent directly to how much value it provides to the company over time

Actually I think that idea causes the opposite of what is wanted.

A high value monopoly patent will stay locked up for a long time, well after the development costs and risk have been paid off. The consumer is paying high economic rent and the product has less supply.

A low value product is where a longer patent makes sense: the patent gives the inventor time to recoup their costs which otherwise wouldn’t happen.

That said, the world runs at a much faster pace, and patent durations should be decreased.

Software patents should be discarded (because society doesn’t get any value from publishing software patents although society pays high costs for the economic monopoly, and because small startups cannot compete with software behemoths). Unlikely to happen becaus software powers have monopoly profits which can pay to influence legislation or regulators. Also the US is capturing monopoly payments from the rest of the world so the US loves software patents (ironically given some of the historic reasons for the US kicking the British in the nads for independence).

[danielheath]

> A high value monopoly patent will stay locked up for a long time

Yes, but this rewards you for inventing something high-value, which is the whole point of patents.

Patents on low-value products largely exist to generate lawsuits against productive entities.

[tolmasky]

It is not the whole point of patents. They at least ostensibly exist as a trade to eventually make the invention enter the public domain. Per Wikipedia:

> In accordance with the original definition of the term "patent", patents are intended to facilitate and encourage disclosure of innovations into the public domain for the common good

The idea is that to avoid companies keeping the details of inventions hidden indefinitely using trade secrets, the embargo period is set up as an incentive to disclose the idea. This is an incredibly important part of the entire social contract of patents. Maintaining a complicated legal apparatus (courts, patent offices, etc.) to defend and enforce these legal monopolies is expensive and is paid through public funds. Thus a public good is expected in return. A system that allows the most important inventions to stay locked up forever seems to go against the spirit of this entirely. Perhaps you think that this has its own merit, but it is certainly not the intended purpose of the patent system.

[danielheath]

An exponentially growing annual fee is also a great way to fund public goods.

For example, if you increment the exponent every three years, a $20 initial fee would cost half a billion dollars annually after 20 years. That buys a lot of school supplies.