"forbidding patent trolling by requiring the patentee to produce the patented invention within a specified period, or lose the patent"
I don't see how this could help, especially with software patents. For every nonsense patent, you could always hire an intern to code it up in an app. Even if it gives you zero business value, you can claim that you're using it internally (or including it in something that you're selling to users). The courts are not well equipped to debunk such claims.
I mean really, could you quickly determine which pieces of infrastructure at google are actually not useful? Which pieces of iOS code?
And for hardware patents, it seems even worse. If I come up with an awesome idea for implementing an adder on SOI, it might take years and millions of dollars of fab time to get that idea into production. Should Intel be able to take it for free just because they already have a fab ready to go?
They have more than enough money to hire patent lawyers though, who are very expensive, which means that they can definitely hire a college code to write some code, toss it into a useless Android market app, sell a few copies to their friends and tell the court "see? We are too a real business using this important patented technique in this thing that we're selling".
If your plan to eliminate patent trolls can be easily thwarted by spending a few grand hiring an intern, it is not a really good plan.
Judges aren't stupid. If the language specifies some honest attempt to use the patent in the marketplace, I could see judges making a judgement on whether or not the example in front of them qualifies. Unlike computer systems, subjectivity and interpretation is a part of the law.
I don't see how a judge could distinguish "my startup is failing to gain traction" from "my company's product is a sham designed to bypass anti-patent-troll regulation".
I don't see how this could help, especially with software patents. For every nonsense patent, you could always hire an intern to code it up in an app. Even if it gives you zero business value, you can claim that you're using it internally (or including it in something that you're selling to users). The courts are not well equipped to debunk such claims.
I mean really, could you quickly determine which pieces of infrastructure at google are actually not useful? Which pieces of iOS code?
And for hardware patents, it seems even worse. If I come up with an awesome idea for implementing an adder on SOI, it might take years and millions of dollars of fab time to get that idea into production. Should Intel be able to take it for free just because they already have a fab ready to go?