Skip to main content  Self-enforcing Patent Sanity  Posted by
arnold on November 22, 2004 at 6:44 PM PST  There are many
suggestions for fixing the patent system, from abolishing it to
radical surgery. Many of these are praiseworthy in design, but
most suffer from a severe problem -- You can't get there from
here. Wonderful end results are nearly impossible to attain
because the forces defending the status quo are powerful and
have little stake in the resulting system.  So here's an idea
that actually gives some major players a strong stake in the
outcome and could have a big impact: Declare that ludicrously
obviously invalid patents are a form of fraud. And enforce that
by giving anyone who proves patent fraud by ludicrosity gets
paid triple their costs as a reward, plus any damages they can
show were caused by the issuance of the patent.  As a starting
point, I would define a "ludicrous" patent as one that any
practitioner normally skilled in the art would recognize as
having prior art. MicroSoft's is our m