[apapli]

What I know of patents is that they need to be sufficiently novel in order to be valid.

The challenge the patent office has is being able to effectively ensure that a patent is novel - it is simply not possible for them to determine if an innovation is truly unique and sufficiently novel, so they grant patents on the basis that they can be disputed if the idea is proven to be not sufficiently original in the future, after doing as many checks as reasonably possible internally via their examination staff.

We need a crowd-scale community who can tap into its broader knowledge to prove these patents are invalid before they are granted, ie at the patent pending stage. This isn't an easy task, but I would imagine that once it is working effectively it would be sufficient dis-incentive for trolls to bother lodging dubious applications in the future.

[alcari]

We have a crowd-scale community checking patent applications now: http://patents.stackexchange.com/

The problem is the sheer number of bad patents that have been granted already, and the cost of successfully challenging them.