Biggest “patent troll” slapped down hard by appeals court

At last, a really good decision has come out of that appeals court. Looks like the removal of the original head of the court and the "passed down decisions" of the next "tier of USA justice" are finally coming into play. Hopefully, this is just the start.

I don't know if this has ever been proposed, but shouldn't there be some kind of rule that if you have a patent on an "invention," and you've never actually produced and distributed said invention, your patent is nullified?

Unfortunately, requiring inventors to produce & distribute their inventions takes away one of the incentives of inventing, ... that of selling your invention to someone else, so that they can produce it. Another incentive to invent is to create something and suppress it,... Some inventors patent their inventions with the intention that no one can produce them as a way of preventing harm by that invention. The auto industry and big oil are huge in that regard.

It's better to disallow patents for things that shouldn't be considered inventions at all. ... Like computer programs.

The other issue is that often, for hardware, the process of commercial development starts with the patent application and goes from there. To require someone to have the finished product or even a prototype on hand before the patent is granted would be woefully unreasonable in some circumstances and would require you to do the research in secret which is something that patenting is supposed to make unnecessary.

Sure, you need enough fleshed out to draft a patent the is specific enough to pass muster. But that might be entirely theoretical at that point.

Maybe if you don't do anything for five years after the patent is issued ...

If patent/copyright were the limited things as they were originally, it would be so much harder to argue against them.

A writer/inventor has one perfect monopoly that cannot be taken away: The choice of when, how, and to whom, to release their work.

People make plenty of money that way, and good for them doing so.