What needs to be changed? Well, for starters they should stop patenting obvious things like shopping carts (1-click or otherwise) and making a comment on a product (Bezos' recent patents); patents for sales referal kickbacks (another Bezos patent); perpetual motion machines (didn't know they actually patented them? check out Scientific American at http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID...7E-90FB809EC5880000); and probably things that the inventors let people use for years and then suddenly applied for the patent (ie. hypertext linking and the like), and not letting them patent things that are actually being developed by groups of people or companies as part of standards-making organizations (wouldn't Rambus fall into that category?). And they could stop making patents for absurd, impossible things that aren't perpetual motion machines, like this one:
 
"Patent 5,533,051, issued in 1996, covers a technique that purports to compress any data set by at least one bit without loss of information--a process that, if done recursively, could shrink the Encyclopaedia Britannica to a single word from which the original could be flawlessly reconstructed. The very idea is preposterous. Yet the patent office agonized for three years over the application--and in the end approved it."

(from Forbes: http://www.forbes.com/global/2000/0529/0311090a_print.html)

Forbes suggests they should maybe pay a little better so they could attract some better talent; that sounds like a start. Whatever the answer, the way they're doing things now is crazy -- you manage to get even a bad patent through, and everyone else has to spend big bucks in court getting it knocked down.

Of course, Philo didn't wait years until TV was established before "discovering" he'd invented it. And he was patenting something actually new and different, not, say, patenting writing notes while talking on the phone (like, for instance Jeff Bezos' patent on "a way to make comments on a product" -- now THAT's something that no one had thought of). The Patent Office has indeed gone nuts, and needs a shakeup real bad.

And, BTW, the reason patents are "often seen as government sanctioned monopolies" is because that's what they are. That's the method government uses to encourage invention, the creation of a short-term monopoly for the patent holder.

Although patents are often seen as government sanctioned monopolies, they are infact the means in which a small guy profits. It just takes big money and corporate political power to protecct those patents and so small guys sell them, to big companies who enjoy the patent's benifits. it is a key to American economic success.
Nader, who is well meaning, and once a voice for the "consumer", (I hate that term.) is kind of nuts. The list of wealth creation from patent holders is big.
Thomas Edison being the most noted, more recently Krishna Bharat (of Google), and the following account being the most memorable:

Philo T. Farnsworth, or as he preferred Phil Farnsworth, is recognized as one of the great mathematicians of the 20th century. He invented television in 1922. He was 14 years old.
At the time, Farnsworth was attending a rural school house near his parent's farm in Idaho. The farmhouse had electricity and he was fascinated by it. In a lab he set up in an attic loft he experimented with generators and electric motors. He also read articles about how scientists were trying to combine motion pictures with radio. The articles discussed the use of mirrors and spinning disks, none of which seemed realistic to Farnsworth. One night he hit on a better idea, capture incoming light in a jar that can detect the light and transmit it in a series of individual lines of electron beams. By magnetically deflect each line one at a time so that together they would form a moving picture. He sketched out his idea for his science teacher. They spent several weeks discussing the idea until they felt that Farnsworth plan was possible.

Decades later, when Farnsworth was fighting radio-industry giant RCA over who invented television first and who should get the patent, the Patent Office asked to meet with the science teacher. The teacher appeared and described what Farnsworth had come up with all those years ago. Base largely on the testimony of the science teacher and the notebooks kept by Farnsworth, the Patent Office awarded the patent rights to Philo T. Farnsworth.