[Nitrolo]

That's already how this works, basically. You have to keep paying a fee to keep your patent, and the fees increase with each year of the patent.

The fees are fixed, but the effect is pretty similar to what you describe.

In some jurisdictions you get a discount on the fees if you declare that you are open to licence out your patent. Then everyone can use your invention without having to ask for permission,as long as they pay the license fee.

EDIT: I looked it up, in Germany (§ 23 PatG) the patent office can set the licence fees that others have to pay, so you can't play games by just setting the fee to a trillion euros.

[qwytw]

> effect is pretty similar to what you describe.

The max yearly fee is $7,400? It can be a lot or absolutely nothing depending on a specific patent.

> In some jurisdictions you get a discount on the fees if you declare that you are open to license out your patent.

Would it really ever be worth the effort just to save a few thousand per year at most?

3,700 if you're a non profit or < 500 employees.

[pgeorgi]

§23 PatG covers the case where the patent owner wants to use a general public licensing scheme offered by the patent office to avoid having to deal with every single licensee. That one is opt-in by the patent owner.

§24 PatG offers a compulsory licensing scheme, but it requires not only that the would-be licensee made an effort to find an agreement with the licensor, but also that such a compulsory license is in the public interest.

Since the public interest doesn't seem well-defined in PatG, you'd have to check older cases to see how that turns out, but I'm not sure if even "doing so reduces bandwidth use on the internet" is enough: you still have the option of using another codec and compensate the worse compression by going for lower resolution video, for example. 4K video is not a human right ;-)

(and "we hog internet resources" is the last thing Netflix et al want to say out loud anyway: ISPs are eager enough as-is to try to get them to pay up for access to their customers.)

[thinkharderdev]

The difference would be that the fee you have to pay is scaled to the value someone else can get from the patent. So if you have a patent which is not valuable to you but is valuable to someone else, then you either have to sell the patent to them or pay a tax based on what value they could get from it.