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Oh I'm sorry, we haven't actually made any revenue on that patent because it's owned by our subsidiary 'PatentCom' which charges us a license fee of $1/yr to use it.

I don't think revenue would work. I say just make it a very short period of time. enough for the inventor to get a jump start and then open it up to benefit all.

Revenue is impossible to compute. For example, can Windows OS sales be attributed to a patent on MS Office?

I am against patents in general, and specially in software, but I can see there is no way to change the system the way politics and lobbying work.

So maybe we should try another approach, something every government likes: taxes. Let's add a tax on patents please. (Maybe copyright too, specially of old (>10 years) works.) A big yearly tax for every patent you own.

It's the only way I can imagine to put some slowdown to the cancerous growth of IP.