What you describe is what the patent system was created for. It&#x27;s pretty easy to see the benefits in encouraging the advancement of costly technology.<p>On the other hand, it&#x27;s software and business process &quot;patents&quot; that I think are harder to defend. Those are better protected IMO through Copyright as opposed to patents. OpenSource licenses (Apache and GPL, Mozilla, Eclipse) have particular provisions set aside to grant licenses to patents based on usage (BSD and MIT make no claims on patents), but Copyright is maintained. Trolls don&#x27;t &quot;use&quot; anything, so the OpenSource license doesn&#x27;t protect you from them (maybe indirectly GPLv3).<p>I think it would better the industry if we properly talk about which types of patents we have issues with.