I personally feel that patents and copyrghts are outdated now. Kinda like unions, they had their initial purposes (and it was a great purpose and reasoning) but now they've outgrown their purpose or have been so distorted that they are no longer needed like they were use to. I think they're still needed to a certain extent. But the opposite needs to be occuring. Instead of increasing duration, decrease the duration. And if your not doing anything with the patent (attempting to make some progress like finding funding or whatever) then it goes into public domain in X amount of years. It's been shown time and time again that patents and copyrights are doing the opposite of what they're intended to do (protect the inventors from being bullied by big companies).

I guess another method would be to set it up so that the lawyer you hire to sue others for patent/copyright infringement can only be paid as much as much as the defense can pay :P (haha that would be funny and probably a bad idea).

It's like that in China right now, and alot of technology is coming out of there (lots of PMPs that we may never see).