Huh? It's clearly a valuable idea, otherwise said other people wouldn't be making money by using it. (We can argue about how much of that money is due to other things how much is due to the idea, but let's assume that the idea is somehow essential to to implementation.)
So, what makes it a bad idea? Surely it can't be the existence of a patent held by someone who isn't practicing.
If you have an idea and do nothing with it, society is not better off.
If you can prevent other people who had the same idea as you from making products based on them just by describing the idea on a piece of paper and getting government's stamp that you were the first one to come to them with it, then the society is worse off.
The scenario you described is an unintended consequence, or a perversion, of how patent system is supposed to work.
> If you have an idea and do nothing with it, society is not better off.
Define nothing. If I write a textbook that other folks use to do something, most people would claim that my textbook made society better off. Do you disagree? Note that patents are disclosure....
> The scenario you described is an unintended consequence, or a perversion, of how patent system is supposed to work.
Oh really? The patent literature says that patents are a trade - a limited term monopoly for disclosure of an idea. You seem to think that patents are protection for folks making stuff.
So? Every law has cases where it comes to the "wrong" result.
More to the point, the overwhelming number of "non-practicing" inventors just want to get paid. You seem to think that they shouldn't get paid.
Note that inventors sell to trolls because trolls are better able to get paid. If you weren't so opposed to inventors getting paid, we could look at ways for inventors to get paid without getting trolls involved.
That's the claim, but there hasn't been much supporting evidence other than "that doesn't deserve a patent". The vast majoritiy of the "that was obvious" claims are pure hindsight. (Yes, some software patents have been overturned because of prior art, just as happens in other fields.)
I particularly like the "that's just math" (which is often claimed wrt RSA). You never hear someone says "that's just chemistry" wrt chemical application patents. (You can't patent chemistry any more than you can patent math.)
This cannot be stressed enough: our patent regime is intended to foster the progress of technology. Where the market for these patents acts efficiently as as intended, the value of a patent is based strictly on its ability to allow a company to generate revenue. This is a specific condition and the threshold of quality tends to be high for patents that can genuinely enable production.
The threshold needed for patents to be merely wielded as weapons is much lower. However, as you can plainly see, this does not diminish their value in the patent marketplace. Thus, the patent system in its current form encourages the misallocation of resources toward patents that do less to promote progress.
Software patents encourage the worse kind of abuse, in part because the patent office is utterly incapable of properly evaluating them; you can patent nearly anything.