As someone who was involved with the patent process for a "legitimate" invention -- meaning one that really was useful and did take considerable thought, time and money to design -- I was somehow both happy and disappointed with the patent lawyer's initial reaction. He said it was a pleasant change to be writing up something where there it a technical person supplying the information and the disclosure really was a genuine advance in the state of the art that might later benefit others. I think there was a recognition and perhaps even a little professional pride there that this was how things were always supposed to work.

He also said that a lot of the time they just get handed some sort of vague write-up with little if any help to understand it nor much access to any technical expert involved in creating it. They have to turn it into the right format to describe something and try and extract the key words or phrases that look interesting in order to build up the hierarchy of claims, but there's little real understanding there and the results probably reflect that.

Most saddening of all, he said that often works anyway, because ultimately a patent enforcement action is going to take place in a court, and it's likely to be a non-expert jury you have to convince of your case. Rather like a complex fraud trial, the issues involved may well be beyond the understanding of some of those jurors, and so to a regrettable degree. What wins cases can be who had the prettiest illustrations or had managed to coin the most intuitively relevant but still distinctive terminology.

Thank you for the real world perspective on at least some of this... I honestly have no involvement but just see the stream of trolls and blanket patent grants and I have to assume things are rotten.

I'm an optimist on this in principle.

From my experience, both filing and researching, there are good patents out there that do disclose useful things that did require some real investment to come up with them. The disclosure and the potential to licence things for mutual benefit with the inventors are beneficial in these cases. And as mentioned before, the patent lawyer I worked with seemed to be appreciate being able to use the system as intended and was keen to make sure we did get things right.

I think it's just that, like almost any government-run system almost anywhere, the relevant authorities are often under-resourced and under-qualified. There aren't enough patent examiners to keep things running at a reasonable speed, and the ones there are can't all be experts on everything or even most areas where they examine. That means the system as a whole primarily benefits large organisations that can churn out applications and get lots of them granted almost like throwing darts at a wall. Then you get the cross-licensing cabals that are weaponising their patents to prevent small-scale competition from gaining a foothold, which is the opposite of the intended effect, and the patent trolls, and other negative actors in the system.

I do have very mixed feelings on what should or should not be patentable and whether different types of invention should all be treated the same way, and indeed this very discussion is a good demonstration of why that is. But the basic principle, applied in fields where it really does promote research and disclosure, has its merits.