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Story: UK Patent Office considers problem of trivial patents

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Continued from previous comment (why isn't the length limit applied when you click submit?)

Where you might need patents is for a way of doing something in software which is very difficult to discover, but once dicovered, easy to reproduce in different, apparently independently created, forms. An example is a compression algorithm or asymmetric encryption - it takes months or years to discover how to do it, but once you know the technique, you can produce apparently different versions of it in a matter of hours. This is where copyright falls down, and patenting is required.
The problem is how to distinguish a trivial patent covering development which was cheap, from a non-trivial one, and where do you draw the line.
Would you grant a patent for a newly discovered hangover prevention, made from collecting the drops which form on sheets of metal left out overnight, to be taken along with your beer. Of course not - no matter how you dress it up, this is just saying drink water with your beer. Clearly trivial.
Likewise a new way of compressing data which cost many millions to develop would be patentable.
Perhaps a sliding scale is best - you submit evidence of your development costs with the patent application, and anything below a threshold cannot be patented at all. If it's above the threshold, you are required to make your patent available to anyone, to be licenced at a fee based on a percentage of the development cost. Anyone who can provide evidence of independent research coming to the same idea can use it for free. If enough people develop it independently, the patent is cancelled.
Now can you patent ideas for patenting laws...

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