If there is a place where government regulation can do some good, this might be it. The combination of these two kinds of company represents a moral hazard. There is a precedent for this kind of regulation, which mandates the separation of certain kinds of companies:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separation_of_investment_and_r...

EDIT:

increasingly in the world of software or tech patents, the trolls rely on the broadest possible interpretation of vague or generalized patents to sow as much uncertainty as possible.

I've run across people involved with patent law here and on reddit, and they seem to get triggered by laypeople ridiculing the vague and abstruse nature of patents. (Really, go and read some! Try searches for video on the Internet!) I find that also weird, in the same way that a lot of legal stuff is weird.

And about 70% of all patent infringement claims are filed by patent trolls, a share that has more than doubled in recent years. It is estimated that litigation initiated by patent trolls in U.S. courts cost companies as much as $30 billion in direct costs, a number that has increased more than four-fold over the last ten years.

Interesting statistic. If the preponderance of patent claims run counter to the original intent of the mechanism, then something is clearly wrong.