Use patents or lose them?

If a company wants to use its patent, but can't arrange financing for manufacturing goods based on the patent, or can't find anyone to manufacture the goods for it, does the company lose its patent?

Is licensing a patent using it? Isn't that what patent trolls already do? If licensing is not considered using a patent, wouldn't that put an incredible dent in biotech research, where most companies license out their discoveries to other companies who actually manufacture the medicines?

Is the loss of patent automatic, or must it be litigated first? If automatic, how does that comport with due process (in the US, in regards to the taking of property rights)? If litigation is required, wouldn't that simply encourage the patentholder's primary competitors to do everything possible to prevent use of the patent? Will notice be required? Will the company be able "redeem" its patent by "using" it within a set grace period after it receives notice that its patent will expire for non-use?

as would anyone who has spent any nontrivial amount of time dealing with the absurdities of our IP system...these people would understand, for example, there are entire "think tanks" that sit around doing nothing all day but cranking out white papers wherein some open standard is extended by a trivial 1%. then they wait for anyone using that open standard, and they pounce based on the extra 1% of trivial and NEVER IMPLEMENTED "innovation".

the people suing here aren't garage innovators. they are law firms that buy IP from bankrupt companies. they are whitepaper mills whose only purpose is to publish a proposal for every conceivable use of technology. thats it. then they wait and watch for victims to appear. THEY DON'T BUILD ANYTHING.

i don't think the casual HN reader understands how bad it is. if you ever hit 5 million/year in revenues, you likely will. an envelope will show up at your office detailing the infingement for something trivial, so trivial you will think its april fool's day. what won't be trivial is the amount the law firm wants to charge you to "license" the patented "innovation". and to be sure, the law firm is not representing another innovator...oh no, the law firm owns the patent themselves. its a huge cash cow now for law firms. they buy patents or arrange to have patents issued from patent-mills. then they just shake down anyone they can. frankly most people who have dealt with this stuff just see it as a shake-down, and they either pay it just to move on, or they move their business to a country that is not so hostile to innovators. if you think US law favors small innovators, WAKE UP

Moderators feel free to edit this into the submission. :-)

An insightful turn of phrase - the relevant congressional committees should hear it.

This stops, say, Fraunhofer Gesselschaft from waiting years as the MP3 community developed using the code it uploaded to ISO with no license attached, then retrospectively demanding $15,000 for every encoding project. Or Unisys failng to enforce the LZW patent while GIF became a standard, then retroactively asking for payment.