I own a few patents, as I&#x27;m sure many on Hacker News do. As I write this, I&#x27;m in the middle of a patent lawsuit with Square (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.plainsite.org&#x2F;dockets&#x2F;24u13j6tr&#x2F;california-northern-district-court&#x2F;think-computer-corporation-v-square-inc&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.plainsite.org&#x2F;dockets&#x2F;24u13j6tr&#x2F;california-northe...</a>). I don&#x27;t apologize for it.<p>I&#x27;m not a troll. I&#x27;m an inventor and I made a real product. I&#x27;m also someone well known for having dealt with intellectual property theft as a victim. I also spent a year at Stanford Law School poking around as a fellow as I developed what is now the most accurate patent assignment database there is--far more accurate than the official one--on PlainSite.<p>I&#x27;ll be deliberately terse with my comments here, but the upshot is that the problem here isn&#x27;t the <i>idea</i> of patents. They are a lottery ticket to a lawsuit as Elon Musk has said, but they&#x27;re also an important insurance policy for serious innovators. (Another such insurance policy is VC, but not every serious innovator has VC backing.) The problem is the legal profession. Patent trolls (and other sorts of IP trolls) are by and large the creations of corrupt lawyers. Inventors are slighted in favor of large corporations because of &quot;upstanding&quot; lawyers. Transparency is impeded everywhere you turn in the patent world courtesy of the patent bar. And unlike the USPTO TTAB, where corporations can represent themselves at virtually no cost, in the USPTO PTAB, the patent bar has seen to it that you must hire a lawyer.<p>It&#x27;s not a coincidence. The system is incredibly broken, but if you want to blame someone, blame the lawyers for ruining what might have been a workable and necessary paradigm.