I think I'd be in favor of throwing out patents entirely.
I don't see any reason for them to exist.
They supposedly exist to protect inventors... but from what?
If patents didn't exist:
I put a lot of effort into R&D. Bring my product to market. I'm now the only person selling my product for a period of time.
You want to duplicate my product. You buy it. You invest in reverse engineering. You can now also sell the product.
How is the original person who invested in R&D harmed? They still made their initial profits. Their future profits might decline... but so what? Can't rest on your laurels. Consumers benefit because they have more choice.
First, how are you going to bring your product to market? If you are independently wealthy, good for you. However, most others need investors or loans to help with that part. Investors would be more hesitant to invest, and banks will charge much higher interest, if there is no collateral or assets left of from a worst-case-scenario failure. Just in case you flub the going to market part of the operation, banks and investors want to see some valuable asset they can sell after the fact to recoup some of their losses. IP is that valuable asset.
Indeed, I think most of the trolls you see are the result of such failures. Startups fail, this is fine, it's part of the process. But those engineers had salaries, which were paid for by investors or banks. To recoup that loss, they sell the patents to companies that are willing to assert them. Without the ability to profit from assertion, the patents are worthless, and thus investors and banks don't get paid back, which means they are less willing to take risks on startups.
Second, it takes very very little time to reverse engineer most things. And the effort put forth is proportional to how successful your product appears. As soon as it looks like it would be profitable to do so, your product will be reverse engineered in a matter of weeks if not days. Look at companies like Chipworks - they have full circuit schematics of very advanced chips within a few weeks of their launch, and that is not on an expedited effort.
Do you really thing a few weeks or months of profitable operation is fair for inventions that could take years to develop?
If patents worked perfectly:
I put a lot of effort into R&D. Bring my product to market. Charge insane prices because I have a monopoly.
The way patents actually work right now:
Starts the same way as if they didn't exist. But wait, a patent troll exists! The person who invested in the R&D gets a BS lawsuit!
Patents make no freaking sense. If they worked perfectly, it would be terrible for consumers. If they didn't exist at all, it would be ideal for consumers. As is, they're terrible for everything but patent trolls and lawyers... consumers and inventors both suffer in the current system.
There are very few patent trolls compared to the huge number of successful stories of IP working as it should. It just doesn't make good headlines or get clicks. Look at companies like ARM - their entire business is licensing their IP to others such as Apple. Look at pretty much every startup that was able to get investors by leveraging their potential IP. Look at every university that is able to fund future research in part by licensing the fruits of prior research. Look at Apple, who probably wouldn't have been able to succeed with the iPhone had they not patented every single thing about it.
Also, patents do work as you said they should "perfectly." There are millions of examples, but one that has been in the news a lot lately is 3D printing - specifically the kind that melts plastic and uses essentially a printer head on a z-axis to inject the plastic onto a xy-axis table. (e.g., MakerBot) This technology was invented a while ago. It was patented and licensed to a few manufacturers who made very expensive 3D printers purchased mostly by big prototyping shops or big engineering companies. They did well raking it in for 20+ years on such great inventions. They did have to fight hard to keep rip-off printers off the US market the entire time, as there were plenty (especially in China) who reverse engineered this in no time at all. When the patents expired, it was as if overnight there were affordable consumer-level 3D printers from dozens of companies.
