But it would also make patent spamming much less valuable and arguably more expensive for the spammer. If you spam patents and get one issued for something that isn't novel and/or already has prior art, everyone can fight it and it quickly gets its metal tested in court.

I imagine a fine for egregious patents could also be implemented. If your patent is demonstrated in court to lack standing, the civil liability is on you, not the patent office.

The hard reality is that nobody actually knows a priori what innovation is. Or how much an innovation is actually worth. If you removed patents that would pretty easily and trivially stop the spam.

The first problem is that what's written in the law and what actually happens are pushed apart by the ridiculous costs of using courts. If fixing that such that courts are fully accessible to anyone without worrying about the cost doesn't produce the desired outcome, then one should look to legislate that outcome. Bad legislation is thus the second problem.

It would allow anyone to patent spam though, that could be a good thing.

Yes this.

While I sympathize with folks calling for weaker patents as an alternative solution, I think that's a non-starter given the power of entrenched interests.

If this were easily fixed, it would be fixed by now.

Best approach might be some OSS patent collective driven by community contributions and a legal team that heavily leverages things like AI to drive down costs. Even then, a big, well funded corp could just drain the coffers with a single, expensive legal battle.

What if you have to pay a fee for each patent application that gets rejected?

Correct, bad actors would use this.