Patent trolls buy politicians and judges to make their trolling profitable.

Patents were originally intended to give inventors a period of ownership over their ideas to ensure new inventions were available for everyone to use and build upon, and not hidden behind factory walls. The goal was to increase the rate of inventions and benefit everyone.

But today the most obvious ideas can be patented by people who don’t ever intend to use them to make anything, and don’t even build a prototype to establish the idea works. Instead they patent merely to shake down many who developed the same idea independently, and actually made it useful by investing and risking their own time and money.

So we ended up with a system that actually penalizes the real developers of new inventions, and essentially rewards lawyers.