I disagree that this will help, because the established companies the pledge would apply to are a secondary problem and mostly seem to fight each other (has Microsoft asserted patents against a startup? has IBM? has AT&T? when they asserted patents it was against multi-million dollar businesses!). The primary problem is patent trolls (see e.g. lodsys / intellectual ventures) for whom this pledge could be considered s…
The problems people note are solvd if you issue a patent free for a short time, like 3 years, and then auction a much smaller number of extensions to that term. This creates a pricing maximum for years 4 to whenever.