I like his suggestion, and it's rare to actually hear a new idea in how to resolve the patent problem.
However I find it odd that in the preamble he points out Apple, but presumably something like an iPhone would easily fall into the class of special purpose computing equipment, so Apple's case would be unaffected by it. In fact, it might even encourage mobile phone platforms to become more locked down and restrictive so as to avoid falling into the definition of a "general purpose" computer. Thus there could be a very dangerous backfiring of this if the definitions were not clear and broad.
The way that I read it would be that the iPhone could definitely be patented. However apps in an app store could not.
So you could have something like the slide to unlock patent. It could bind software shipped as part of the base operating system. But app developers could implement that same feature in an app and be fine.
The way I understand his idea is that a phone is a general purpose computer. If Apple wants to patent slide-to-unlock, they can only patent a hardware implementation (i.e. a chip that only does slide-to-unlock, which is clearly a ridiculous idea).
Then I can come along and write software for Android that implements slide-to-unlock, and I am not infringing because my implementation is software only.
The end result of this means that Apple's slide-to-unlock patent would become worthless.
However I find it odd that in the preamble he points out Apple, but presumably something like an iPhone would easily fall into the class of special purpose computing equipment, so Apple's case would be unaffected by it. In fact, it might even encourage mobile phone platforms to become more locked down and restrictive so as to avoid falling into the definition of a "general purpose" computer. Thus there could be a very dangerous backfiring of this if the definitions were not clear and broad.