Aside from the time limit, there seems to be no limitations on copyright and patents. The way to return fertile ideas to the public domain outside of the time limit could be a court of appeal of ideas wherein interested participants could request that the public interest would be better served by the idea in the public domain than in private hands. This would be judged by a jury of experts chosen to be neutral and fair.

The only incentive that businesses have for innovation is the competitive protection of a patent. I agree that its time limit should be enforced more consistently. And 17 years is probably too long in a modern society, although we would need some real "plumber" economists to do the studies and propose an alternate number of years.

But the only reason for invalidating a patent must be prior art. If a jury gets to steal a patent for public good then you are undermining the whole patent protection concept.

If a competitor has an advantage because of their patent, and all I have to do is file a suit claiming that the public would be better off if the patent were opened to everyone, then I could easily nullify that patent every time.

In every single individual case the public would be better off if the patent were opened--the public would get the improved goods at a lower price. But in aggregate, innovation by business would effectively cease because they couldn't make a profit from it. So the long-term best interest of the people is that patent rights be protected. And you will have a hard time explaining that to every jury, if the patent rules are not clear that "public good" is not a valid reason to open a patent.

I like the "why not" idea of sharing ideas. But we cannot research Cancer drugs this way. Some types of innovation still need a focused and funded corporate profit model. (I have a spooky feeling that I'm about to get a lot of hate mail for this last paragraph.)

Perhaps there should be a spectrum of permission to enter an idea into the public domain. Instead of a total cutoff of profit for the innovator the idea could be evaluated as to its benefit and any use of the idea by competitors could be modified by payment to the original innovator of a percentage of further development rather than permitting the original innovator to totally squelch innovative elaboration of the original concept. Of course the original innovator should be given primary opportunity for further development but should not be permitted to delay public benefit by sitting on the idea and halting further innovation.