You could keep the time limits where they are, if only they required that the inventions "actually" be novel and non-obvious.
They need to stop issuing patents for basic reorganizations of existing tech. Idiotic things like a "one click checkout" or "sending email" or "packaging a media file into a podcast" should have been kicked back with a big red "denied" stamp from the USPTO after about 10 minutes of wasted time by the examiner.
They do not seem to be checking obviousness at all.
And if this scares you may I suggest you never look up what determines if a public prosecutor takes a case or how social workers decide to go after children or psychologically ill people or not.
They don't look at prior art. Otherwise, they would have found all the prior art that the "vigilante engineer" found (and it's not like it was very hard to find, some was ironically linked from the patent itself).
They do look at prior art but remember they only have basically a "google search" type of tool so often find so-called duplicates that are not (because they have the same words in the title maybe) and miss ones that are the same because they are called something else.
Just a very poor system for the money it costs and the potential outcomes to businesses who can literally go bust over a wrong decision.
They need to stop issuing patents for basic reorganizations of existing tech. Idiotic things like a "one click checkout" or "sending email" or "packaging a media file into a podcast" should have been kicked back with a big red "denied" stamp from the USPTO after about 10 minutes of wasted time by the examiner.