While everybody agrees the current patenting system (especially software patents) is broken, there is little agreement about what to do about it. Many would like to return to some earlier state "when patents worked properly". So here is a proposal, not necessarily a magic bullet, but a step.

The point of patents is/was to make a process "patently clear". Anyone who has read modern patents knows they are anything but clear: they are written in legalese, and engineers and inventors are recommended not to read them: it is both pointless, and dangerous: dangerous, because wilfully infringing patents triples the damages awarded compared to just being ignorant. In other words, you are unlikely to realise that you are infringing a patent (it is so poorly worded) and will accidentally infringe it, earning extra penalties for you diligence in checking.

So the solution: Explicitly make patents something "a person with ordinary skill in the art" shall be expected to have read.

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As a scientist, I regularly (daily) scan the abstracts at arXiv.org to see advances in my field: why not patents ? Why is there no equivalent for patents ? To return patents to their original utility, patents should be written and read by inventors, not lawyers. There should be classes in how to write clear patents in college: clear technical writing is an important science skill. By all means, lawyers could and should explain then how to write such legal documents, but that should be the limit of it.

We could go further and not only read published patents, but proposed patents: as the final stage of application, the patent application should be made public for a prior art challenge. It annoyed me that as a commercial software writer, where almost no-one else read my code, someone could patent a technique that I and others had used for years, because it was not published prior art. Then my product would be infringing, even though it pre-existed the patent! pushlishing the proposed patents with a public review period could fix this.

Requiring people in the field to have been expected to have read patents would apply the necessary pressure, then, to have patents written clearly, and put pressure to minimize the sheer number of patents. It would help return the utility to patents.