"So I had an idea the other day for a patent reform: property tax on patents.
As long as a company wants to keep the monopoly rights over a patented invention, they are taxed a percentage of the patent's market value each year. They can choose either to pay that tax or sell the patent to someone else.
The government would offer to buy any patent for its market value, using tax revenue gathered from other patents, in doing so putting the invention into the public domain.
This would discourage companies from building large 'defensive' patent portfolios, since they'd be expensive to maintain. It works for the 'lone inventor' scenario too, since the market value of a new, untried invention would be low.
Once a patent's value is proven by developing the patent, its value will rise. At some point, the benefit derived from the patent's monopoly rights will no longer be worth the cost, and the rational thing to do is sell the invention."
possibly, doesn't seem to be exactly like I remember but is quite possibly my memory fail. Although it's not clear in your comment where the market value comes from (e.g. is it essentially the government is the market maker? that seems like a bad idea as central authority is unlikely to understand and price everything correctly). What stops people from understating the patent value?
EDIT - I guess main point is - is the patent value declared by owner and does the value affect ability to litigate?
One way you may be able to do it is to make patents always available for sale at their declared value. By declaring a patent's value, anyone (including the government itself) can offer to buy it from you for that amount of money. You must then either accept the offer, or block the sale by increasing its value beyond what the other party is willing to pay.
"So I had an idea the other day for a patent reform: property tax on patents.
As long as a company wants to keep the monopoly rights over a patented invention, they are taxed a percentage of the patent's market value each year. They can choose either to pay that tax or sell the patent to someone else.
The government would offer to buy any patent for its market value, using tax revenue gathered from other patents, in doing so putting the invention into the public domain.
This would discourage companies from building large 'defensive' patent portfolios, since they'd be expensive to maintain. It works for the 'lone inventor' scenario too, since the market value of a new, untried invention would be low.
Once a patent's value is proven by developing the patent, its value will rise. At some point, the benefit derived from the patent's monopoly rights will no longer be worth the cost, and the rational thing to do is sell the invention."
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4558402