I for one would say the no brainer solution would be to abolish patents. I know blah blah medical research, years investment blah blah, but after the investment is made back, it is abused again. And shit like Monsanto. Abolishment would be best imho. But as that's not in the cards, the next simple thing would be; if you (the company the patent belongs to, bought or created; not a partial parent owner, not some entity you have shares in; no, the physical company) are not actively creating, selling and marketing a product(s) the patent(s) are about, you cannot attack companies who are. If the 'enemy' openly started selling/marketing/producing with the product before you did, you are just out of luck; even if you create it after that you cannot sue. This is easy to check and follow up; there will be thousands/millions traces of actual sold and delivered product to end clients on tax papers, logistics papers, manufacturing papers etc which proves who was first.
So if you had the patent, which was supposed to be original in the first place, then, because it was so 'original' (saying 'original' because at least in case of software it just never is and many(most) hardware cases aren't either) you could've easily been the first to exploit it right? If not; sorry for you, your patent lands in /dev/null. Will never happen but seems to be a logical and solid way of doing this.
Oh yes, and make the patent related to the investment used to come to it; you have to provide paper trail what 'enormous and painful investments in time and money' you did to get to that 'one click payment idea'; you can only sue others until your company made that investment back times X (X=10 or whatever), not after that.
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I for one would say the no brainer solution would be to abolish patents. I know blah blah medical research, years investment blah blah, but after the investment is made back, it is abused again. And shit like Monsanto. Abolishment would be best imho. But as that's not in the cards, the next simple thing would be; if you (the company the patent belongs to, bought or created; not a partial parent owner, not some entity you have shares in; no, the physical company) are not actively creating, selling and marketing a product(s) the patent(s) are about, you cannot attack companies who are. If the 'enemy' openly started selling/marketing/producing with the product before you did, you are just out of luck; even if you create it after that you cannot sue. This is easy to check and follow up; there will be thousands/millions traces of actual sold and delivered product to end clients on tax papers, logistics papers, manufacturing papers etc which proves who was first.
So if you had the patent, which was supposed to be original in the first place, then, because it was so 'original' (saying 'original' because at least in case of software it just never is and many(most) hardware cases aren't either) you could've easily been the first to exploit it right? If not; sorry for you, your patent lands in /dev/null. Will never happen but seems to be a logical and solid way of doing this.
Oh yes, and make the patent related to the investment used to come to it; you have to provide paper trail what 'enormous and painful investments in time and money' you did to get to that 'one click payment idea'; you can only sue others until your company made that investment back times X (X=10 or whatever), not after that.