The New York Times reports that the Electronic Frontier Foundation has launched a systematic attack against over-broad patents. (Image from the University of California.)

The EFF is focusing for now on 10 patents, where it thinks it can find prior art that will invalidate the patents.

This is good news, but it's just a first step.

For starters, the US Patent and Trademark Office needs a lot more money so it can investigate claims itself and reject more of them. The money, of course, needs to come from those seeking patents, but if it were made a straight fee I'm certain it would inhibit use of the patent process.

So I have "a cunning plan." Patent holders could either pay a straight fee or agree to pay the fee over time, from the financial gains of an issued patent. This would require some new law, and some new thinking, but if the patent office's take were limited to, say, 1% of gross up to a certain figure it wouldn't burden anyone.

More important, of course, is that the patent law itself needs to be reworked, in tandem with the copyright law. It's ridiculous that a song has greater, longer-lasting protection than an invention, and the solution isn't to make patent rights infinite. The solution is to rein-in copyright, and to limit copyright's protections to that specific expression, made in that specific way, so that satire and the use of old work to create new work are both protected.

This debate will take years to play out, and it's best that those with a Clue about the real world engage in it now, because anything we settle on (through groups like the EFF and others) is bound to be strongly challenged by the industries (including the legal industries) that benefit from the status quo at the expense of creativity.