What would it take, specifically, to bring about meaningful patent reform? I hear about the need for it almost daily, but I'm not sure how this sort of highly convoluted problem can be fixed.
Are there any existing bills or proposals that have put forward a viable solution to this issue?
The internet is global, legal jurisdictions are national. If the business risk of infringing patents becomes too high in the US, it creates an incentive for companies doing business online to move legal jurisdictions, or for other countries to offer incentives to internet based companies by guaranteeing that they will not support software patents. Presumably at that point pressure for patent reform in the US would increase, but by then it may not matter.
In a different context, favorable regulations are one reason that e.g. The City (i.e., financial district on London) is a global financial hub.
If you wish to do business in the USA, you cannot ignore US patent law. Therefore moving out of the US is a hardship for you with absolutely no potential upside.
Fortunately for many people, the US is not the only country.
Millions of companies survive and thrive without doing business in the US. At this time in history, we are used to thinking of the US as being a favorable business climate; relatively free of corruption with clear rules and low cost of business formation. It is clear that unless current trends are reversed that this will not remain the case.
If the governments of the countries of Northern Africa (Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and Morocco) were to form a regional economic initiative that created those conditions from the Suez Canal to the Atlantic Coast and created a clean Intellectual Property regime with automatic licensing they would attract a decent share of global technology investment if they could make it stick.
Automatic licensing in this context being the rule that no one can deny another the use of an invention, but proven priority and disclosure grants an automatic share of the license collected out of the VAT or other tax on finished goods.
Automatic licensing sounds like a very interesting way to balance IP creator interests with IP consumer interests.
Extend the same principle to copyright: Hollywood can't refuse to sell me a movie just because I don't live in a certain geographical area, and RIAA can't deny YouTube users the right to cover and remix their music as long as a reasonable fee is collected by some other means, whether privately or via a public distribution scheme.
Perhaps the law should define a nominal amount per work that relieves the payer of all IP-related liability. The amount could depend on the type of work, and/or proportional to the profit generated, so that hobbyists who only copy stuff for personal use pay at the lowest bracket and people who make a lot of money out of other people's IP pay more, just like taxes.
See the recent kerfuffle about online gambling domain name seizures. If something is deemed illegal for US consumers, the DOJ works pretty hard to shut it down regardless of jurisdiction - although if I recall correctly, one of the triggers for seizure in the online gambling case was that the sites were clearly marketed as catering for the US consumer.
Would it make sense to only give patents to companies that are actively developing something and marketing a product?
On that note, although this wouldn't work for ebooks, how about restrictive copyright for readers is only present while the book is still being published and sold?
To address your first point about patents, I really think that would be a bad idea. Making the patent code more complicated just rewards the people who spend lots of effort on mastering its arcade rules and not making something people want. In this case, a requirement that your product had to be in production would be an easy thing to get around if you had money and know-how (just make a small run of the product that meets the bare minimum requirements), but could really mess up companies that don't have the money to do that, or haven't lawyered up and don't realize they have to.
I think we're watching it now, actually. Big companies get the short end of the stick on crappy patents. It won't be long before they're lobbying to get it fixed.
If a major company like Apple, Google, Microsoft or IBM sues a tiny company for violating an "obvious" patent, it gets all over the tech media and the big companies reputation suffers.
And there's not much money in suing small companies, so it's not worth it. And the other big companies have enough lawyers and safe guards to make sure they don't violate patents (or at least make sure nobody finds out), so there's no money there, either.
On the other hand, the big companies are major targets for patent trolls, as this case demonstrates.
>And there's not much money in suing small companies, so it's not worth it.
This is too simplistic. The patent system is the way it is because big companies like it that way. The reason they like it that way is they can strangle any nascent competition with patent lawsuits before that competition has a chance to grab market share.
And it doesn't even matter whether or not the claim is valid - small companies can't afford to defend themselves, whether or not they win in court. The point of suing a small company for patent infringement isn't to collect money, it's to put that company out of business.
Are there any existing bills or proposals that have put forward a viable solution to this issue?