Why isn't there a Kickstarter for killing patents?

There's a YC backed startup doing just that. https://www.microryza.com/

Large companies with deep pockets existed because there was no way to internationally organize around a monetary research fund cause and get live information about the progress in both a transparent and not prohitively expensive way for the organization to operate.

Ten years ago, you would have to mail dvds because internet speeds weren't fast enough to live-stream the office surveilance camera. Twenty years ago you would have had to snail mail a bulletin every month about status updates.

Today you make a wordpress site with a $3 a year .com address and $50 a month hosting (or host it on the various media sites interlinked like a Tumblr), post live updates, and stream / upload video and audio about progress at a whim.

The middle men of a lot of things (movie production, r&d) did not exist because people wouldn't fund those on their own. They existed because it was infeasible to organize millions of funders and to properly broadcast progress to millions the way such organizations could to a boardroom. That has since changed.

I really don't understand what you're advocating or what mechanism you hope to develop.

You basically want to put out bounties for law firms to take cases against patents? What patents would they target? What adversarial setting would they defend / attack patents in? Couldn't this result in a race to the bottom about what things people want in the public domain - ie. a bunch of people petitioning to have a law firm attack Amazon's One-Click patent? Basically if someone made something desirable enough, then an efficient market would funnel enough money into trumping their patent through your concept, destroying whatever incentive the company had to make something valuable.

I could be off on what your suggesting, so i apologize.

While there are lots of flaws & advantages in the patent system, one major opinion I have is that there should be some sort of use/active-pursue requirement. Ie. you can't claim property ownership over an idea unless you're actively putting it into product / trying to figure out how. Or maybe a shorter length of the patent (ie. 5/10 years), unless you're actively pursuing it.

This would be similar to adjustments in other types of property law. Ie. a lot of property law is based on incentives to define ownership / acquisition in a means that most benefits society. For example in the old property case Brazelton, they didn't award ownership to the person who found a sunk ship & squatted on it, but rather awarded ownership to the person who came later but actually had the technology to lift it.

Well, the model would be a little different. It wouldn't be just about money. You would want to crowd-source work, ancillary projects, etc. Also, I wouldn't crowd-source a cure for cancer, but research in general.

For example, we might find a way to cure a lot of cancers by simply detecting them when they are days old when they are easier to treat, so a better, and inexpensive, way to detect cancers would be valuable.

I don't agree that killing patents is the right approach, how about this as an alternative: The site's admin team could identify patents of particularly useful or disruptive potential and users could pledge a value to bring this patent into the public domain, and their pledge could remain valid for some reasonable period of time, the site could then put forward the aggregate pledge and buy the patent with the view to releasing it. Perhaps a price could be agreed upon up front. The same could be done to bring creative works like books into the public domain.