[BigZaphod]

There's probably problems with this, but...

Patents should not be an exclusive license. Instead they should be a limited time income tax benefit. In other words, when you are granted a patent then you get some small percentage break in your income taxes for some number of years. So the only way to benefit from granted patents is to have some actual income! Once an idea is patented, you cannot charge a license fee for the idea as the idea is now public. You can, however, still license implementations of the idea - just like you can with implementations of proprietary ideas covered by trade secret.

The granting of patents would work the same way they do now - first one to file wins. However since you do not get the benefit of owning an idea for the next 20 years and collecting licensing fees on it, the benefit of filing for a patent on new ideas immediately might be a lot lower than it would be to just keep it secret under trade secret and use it yourself as long as possible. The idea here would be to balance the value of an idea in trade with the value of it as an income tax benefit. If you have a bunch of good ideas you've been using for years but are no longer really "secret" you could attempt to patent those old ideas so that the rest of the world can share them and you can get some tax breaks on perhaps the down swing of a product's life cycle. If someone else has already patented the idea ahead of you, well, so be it. The idea is out there already so society hasn't lost anything.

My thinking is that this could be balanced so that the tax benefits are such that companies would want to keep things secret for awhile but then attempt to patent older ideas once products near end of life. It's a race and balance there between keeping something secret and trying to get the tax benefit out of old ideas that might not be very profitable on their own anymore. Any tax benefit would be better than none, so it would seem that old ideas that are no longer used but were being hoarded by the company would suddenly be "valuable" to them, so they'd get the idea out into the public and everybody wins in the long run.

[SamReidHughes]

It's really easy to come up with patentable ideas at the current standard of patentability. If you paid people for patents as you suggest, you'd just get flooded with patents for novel but useless contraptions. So then you'd need to get the government deciding whether something is useful and paying people create allegedly useful inventions, rather than the marketplace.

[BigZaphod]

No one would be getting paid (by way of tax discount) for a patent unless they're already doing something the market values and therefore generating an income to tax in the first place. It doesn't matter if the income is from use of the idea in the patents or not. Any income generation is a sign the market is rewarding them for something. The government doesn't need to decide anything differently than they do now.

The patent system is already flooded with useless and novel things. The reason is that people are hoping that over the next 20 years (or whatever) that the idea might suddenly become valuable and they can profit off it. With my idea, at least, you cannot profit from a patent unless you're already profiting in the market.

[SamReidHughes]

You're proposing that Joe the candy store owner be given money by the government for filing a patent on kite-powered lawn mowers.

You claim that since Joe is evidently providing something the market values, we should cut his taxes.

But that's what everybody with income does. So why not cut everybody's taxes? We could do that without a sideshow of filing useless patents.

This idea

1. Does not tie rewards in any way to actual innovation.

2. Explicitly suggests that people keep things as trade secrets for a while, which negates the actual purpose of the patent system!

[BigZaphod]

If you know the perfect solution, I'm sure we'd all love to hear it. All you're doing it tearing me down. You're not offering any suggestions to fix these apparently obvious glaring problems in my idea or the current system.