It's not passee per se.
Patents are still a good thing, but the process of granting and licensing need review.
Certainly no member of a standards group should be able to push a concept of something
as a standard without revealing that they have a patent for it.
Patents need more examiners that are expert in the field related to the patent.
Having a lawyer decide that something created/implemented by an expert in a different
fields (software/hardware/biological) makes little sense.
There is no way a decent web programmer would have ever granted Amazon the one-click
patent for what is basically a simple link to a cookie to a database. It's both obvious and
preexisting in different forms.
Patents that are not implemented within a reasonable time frame, say the half-life of the
patent, should expire.
Patent holders should have a duty on a level of trademark holders to inform a user of potential infringement.
Patent holders holders who are not actively using the technology should be required to license them at reasonable and non-discriminatory rates set based on the nature of the concept and within proportion of the value it adds to any product.
