The main issue seems to be the inability of the patent office to realize what's trivial and what's not when reviewing a patent.
It fails to do that because it's actually not a trivial thing to do at all when you're not familiar with the field: it is very difficult for a non-IT professional to take a look at Kruskal's pseudocode ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kruskal%27s_algorithm#Descripti... ) and to state if it solves an existing pain or it's just describing trivial and intuitive, common-knowledge steps.
A solution would be to have patent reviewers splited in categories based on their professional accreditation and limit their ability to accept or deny patents to their field of expertise.
I think that's an approach that--on the outset--anyone can agree with. But the problem is that any decent professional of a field capable of doing that are also not the ones willing to sit in the patent office merely reviewing applications.
It's the same principle as PG mentioned in his essay that first rate technical people do not hire themselves out to do due diligence work for VC's, and as a result the "experts" VC's do send over are generally a joke. What's to prevent the same from happening in the patent review office?
You could pay them at their true value; high-end 6 figures would compensate the dulness and they would work for a healthy cause - the patent office could rise the patent review fees to cover up the costs, which would also have the benefit of eliminating the trivial patent applications that can't pull the weight of the review fees.
I doubt this will raise final consumer prices since for new inventions the price is more often than not what the market tolerates - I think companies will be forced to drop trivial applications as a response to the fee increase.
The other change I would make would be to limit the patent validity to 10 - 15 years max, so after the rich people pay for the research, the invention becomes available to the masses close to the actual production cost.
Just to add on to what hendzen said, they are already rather expensive as it is: $15,000 for 20 years (in Canada, where I'm from). Hardly affordable for the average small-time inventor. A friend of mine whom just patented a method of preventing over-the-shoulder spying for PIN input devices and could only afford to buy patent protection for 1 year (and for some odd reason, it cannot be increased with future payments--so whatever you commit to buying in the outset is how much protection you'll receive, period.) Increasing it further would simply make the price far too prohibitive.
As for limiting the patent validity period, the current 20 years that most nations follow is not all that long depending on the circumstance. A better method (if it's even regulatable) is X years of protection OR until you recoup your original investment + X % of return (whichever occurs first). The problem is to then police the claims of cost to invent the patent, which is a whole can of worms on its own.
This would also hamper the original purpose of patents - to protect small time inventors from large companies duplicating their inventions. Sure, maybe Apple could afford greatly increased patent fees, but if you raised them enough to pay for six-figure salaries of patent examiners, it would be prohibitively expensive for ordinary people to use the system.
It fails to do that because it's actually not a trivial thing to do at all when you're not familiar with the field: it is very difficult for a non-IT professional to take a look at Kruskal's pseudocode ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kruskal%27s_algorithm#Descripti... ) and to state if it solves an existing pain or it's just describing trivial and intuitive, common-knowledge steps.
A solution would be to have patent reviewers splited in categories based on their professional accreditation and limit their ability to accept or deny patents to their field of expertise.