Never used a fixed number for anything. Just tie it to a percentage of yearly revenue of the entity. This way you can ensure:
- small companies and private people can afford patents
- big corps do not get an advantage, in fact the bigger they get, the more expensive holding a patent becomes, ensuring they have to use those patents and not patent everything just because
- number of patents any single entity can hold is limited, unless they want to go in debt for holding patents
- there could still be a minimum yearly amount as proposed by you
That just means patent trolls would split their patent portfolios into hundreds of holding companies. Also people would start filing bigger and bigger patents, stuffing more and more claims into a single patent.
Well this is a problem we need to tackle anyways. Splitting things into a thousand holding companies should be with considerable cost as well for those involved with a thousand holding companies.
There is literally no case in which society profits from a corp being split up into a thousand holdings.
How often are you allowed to change this? Could just undervalue it until you suddenly don't. If you are not allowed to change it that is not an uninteresting idea.
- small companies and private people can afford patents
- big corps do not get an advantage, in fact the bigger they get, the more expensive holding a patent becomes, ensuring they have to use those patents and not patent everything just because
- number of patents any single entity can hold is limited, unless they want to go in debt for holding patents
- there could still be a minimum yearly amount as proposed by you