I realized one point regarding patents that I haven't thought of before. Patents shouldn't be transferable or saleable.
A patent should be nominated to its inventor personally and for a company to profit from it they would have to connect with that person. They could employ him or otherwise compensate him for being able to do things that were patented.
This would diminish possibilities for all kinds of trickery and return the power back to the actual inventor. A company who wishes to invest in patents would have to compensate these inventors more than fairly to reach an agreement where the inventor only licenses the patent to that company. Futile, bogus, or useless patents wouldn't be paid for so nobody wouldn't bother to file them. Inventors would have a big financial incentive to invent things that are truly good enough to be worth somebody paying for them.
I'm not sure how taking away an inventor's current right to sell his patent counts as "return[ing] the power back to the actual inventor."
Also, under current law, an exclusive licensee can be granted the right to sue on a patent. So you'd have to change that part of the law as well, for your scheme to actually change anything.
I don't see how that would particularly help. If patents couldn't be sold, they would instead be licensed under highly permissive and exclusive terms. The effect would be the same and it would simply add needless complexity to the system. Complexity is largely the cause of the existing problem.
This is an excellent point. This gives the inventor sufficient protection, and lower the incentive to hog patents by non-inventors. May be a gradual degradation would be good. Any non-original inventor held patent expires in 1/3 of the time.
A patent should be nominated to its inventor personally and for a company to profit from it they would have to connect with that person. They could employ him or otherwise compensate him for being able to do things that were patented.
This would diminish possibilities for all kinds of trickery and return the power back to the actual inventor. A company who wishes to invest in patents would have to compensate these inventors more than fairly to reach an agreement where the inventor only licenses the patent to that company. Futile, bogus, or useless patents wouldn't be paid for so nobody wouldn't bother to file them. Inventors would have a big financial incentive to invent things that are truly good enough to be worth somebody paying for them.