[brwnll]

This was my initial thought. But after consideration this would likely to just lead to companies creating holding/shell companies for groups of patents.

Effectively, Big Corp would spin up "Obvious Shopping Cart Patents, LLC", wholly owned by Big Corp, and register their patents for a given category through it. Then they could sell the entire company to another entity without the patents themselves transferring ownership.

The best fix for patents I can think of is simply lowering their lifetime to somewhere in the 2 - 5 year range.

[placeybordeaux]

Thats too short for some fields. The real problem is that tech moves so fast that a lot of the assumptions and hard coded values in the law simply don't work in tech.

[CydeWeys]

Longer lived patents totally make sense in other industries, though. Look at the pace of innovation in, say, space exploration. It can take longer than two years just to build and test a new rocket design, so if your patent expired before your first real launch, it would have huge chilling effects on R&D.

I'd say a better solution is to just make software ineligible for patents entirely.