Comment given enough eyeballs, all claims are hollow (Score 2, Interesting) 191
This could all be fixed by issuing the original patent provisionally, and mandating a second, more thorough review by the patent office when the decorative sabre is first unsheathed.
Maybe the target of the action files an application for second-stage examination and ponies up a small fee on the order of $1000, then the patent office adds the patent to their public "notice of re-examination" board for sixty days to solicit any other public input. After the examination, the target recovers from the patent holder $250 for every claim shot down and another $5000 if the entire patent falls (the patent infringement action could permit the patent holder to exercise only certain claims, so as not to place themselves on the hook for the claim-reversal penalty award on every frivolous claim, but they still owe the $5000 penalty award if claims associated with the infringement action is reduced to the empty set).
Second-stage ratification doesn't need to be a big thing. It only needs to be as big as what the first-stage examination was originally presupposed to accomplish when this whole system was first set up, back when it was possible for a patent examiner to have his or her finger on the pulse of innovation to any extent at all, before human knowledge blue-shifted by a further six orders of magnitude.
To a first approximation, given enough eyeballs, all claims are hollow.
What we really need is a mechanical turk to challenge claims of novel art and claims of application (which should be separated). If the patent holder wished to instigate second-phase examination without filing against an adversary (so as to increase their litigational certitude before uncasking their powder), they would need to post $10,000 as a bounty fund. The public would be invited to submit arguments against any particular claim (much like a bug-tracking system). Maybe there's a $5 fee per hundred words (minimum $5) for each argument filed. The first argument (by filing time) to unseat a claim is awarded a $250 refutation bounty from the bounty fund.
Even better, people are allowed to pay $5 to click "me too". All the "me too" payments are funnelled to the person who originally filed the item (small profit, same day). All parties split the bounty (including the item owner) if that item scores (the incentive to be the fiftieth person to click "me too" is not attractive; by interpolation, the "me too" button functions as a prediction market).
I think we just need to bring a mechanical turk free market processes to bear on the patent approval system, and abuses would soon be dramatically scaled back.
If a company just wants to accumulate patents it could potentially waggle, nothing changes, and all the same press releases can still be penned (mentions of patents pursued would mean less, now being more frail in the waggling, but this is the usual erosion of sense anyone shrewd has long observed).