So, this case just makes things equal between the plaintiffs and defendants. Once the plaintiffs do overcome the admittedly-high obstacle of proving invalidity, the defendant can't just put up a weak defense and get away with it. That's good!
Your problem with the patent system is completely valid, but the Supreme Court can't change law (or is not supposed to). Congress is the one who is responsible for this quagmire, not the Court.
The whole patent system is broken, and this case improves things by a nanogram (is that a word?)./
Time to petition congress. It does feel like we're near an inflection point.
I just think that Congress needs to be reeducated about the different needs of today's technology industry versus the old-days of steel mills. It won't be easy, but I'm confident it will happen someday.
The question is whether I'll be alive then (heh).
And now that you have a patent and sue somebody, this other person may be able to put together some evidence that shows the patent is invalid, but they must climb a very high bar now.
In this case MS had prior art in a past i4i product that appeared to have the functionality that i4i had patented. i4i says it was different, but the source code had been destroyed. Had this challenge been brought up during the original patent examination, they could have pressed i4i to prove that this didn't infringe. But once i4i has the patent now MS must prove that it does, w/o the source code.