The ultimate with your logic is that it would call for massive legislation to cover every facet of our lives - everything bad must be made illegal, otherwise nobody can even be criticised for doing it. I don't want to live in a world like that. Laws are far too crude for that, they can only work at extremes where it is clear you can put down a blanket rule. In between, people and companies behaving badly should be held to account through criticism and public pressure. We should expect companies to behave honorably and ethically and criticise them heavily when they don't.

Also, what makes you think we don't already have "massive legislation to cover every facet of our lives"? Have you ever heard of the book "Three Felonies a Day"?

Increased legislation is rarely the answer. I do not have a pre-rolled solution for the 'patent problem', but - contrary to popular opinion - this is not required to point out flaws in the current system. Perhaps the current system is the best we can do, but that does not excuse its flaws. We should always aim for what could be - and what we could, maybe, come up with is a system that encourages innovation (through financial reward) yet disallows this kind of destructive behaviour. How? Who knows.

I bet 10 years ago if you applied such thinking to finance you wouldn't have got very far - "central bankers supplying fiat money is good enough"...yet now we have Bitcoin et. al., a whole host of currencies whose aggregate behaviour is mathematically provable.

Focus on the could, anything less is not worthy of the tag 'innovation'.

Nobody's oblivious to the actual issue; it's just that the root of the problem is inaccessibly mired in a tangled web of lobbying networks, conflicting interests, and impenetrable committees.

Opportunists are just as guilty of making the world worse as the laws that enable them.

Opportunists are faced with the decision "Should I attempt to make a bucketload of cash, and secure my family's - and my stakeholders families' - future, or should I take a moral stance, make no money, and console myself in poverty because I'm a 'good' person?"

Contrarily, lawmakers have all of the tools required to make a better system, and yet choose not to, for the same indecipherable reasons so many political decisions are made.

I'd like to see politicians react to that...

Lobbying, though, would get their attention. Like it or not, that's how one operates the levers of power in Washington at the moment

Exactly. The legislation and regulatory apparatus built around it allow people to claim exclusivity on ideas and techniques that are already obvious to most people in the field. This must be fixed with legislation.

Calling companies trolls on internet forums unread by the vast majority of citizens really doesn't help the cause. These companies make their living enforcing patents. They aren't going to stop because people say mean things about them. They are going to stop when the law makes their business obsolete.

Unfortunately, patents are becoming more commoditized than healthcare in our country. It seems silly to me that someone is permitted to sue on the basis of patent violation when a) they weren't the original inventor, b) they bought the patent for the entire reason of profiting from litigation, or c) they're suing people who 'violated' their patent prior to the time they purchased it.