it seems like cheating when you can simply buy creative ideas to engage in This just underlines the futility of the patent system. Anyone who's patenting real

it seems like cheating when you can simply buy creative ideas to engage in This just underlines the futility of the patent system. Anyone who's patenting real things because they're creative and innovative is playing the old game. The new game is patent anything you can think of, do it a lot, and bet on the shotgun approach when the shit hits the fan. When it comes to patents, when there's much hassle then most companies drop their charges/defenses and just settle. When there's too much hassle then many won't even sue. The final outcome of this degeneration of patents is that companies just buy enough patents, any patents, in numbers to establish a premeditated interlock on mutual interests. It's primarily controlled by the amount of money available to be spent on defences. In this sort of scheme patents would just become mere papers. The actual validity would remain at least far-fetched as today. If markets work as usual there might be actual patent manufacturing companies too, because it's obviously cheaper to buy mass-produced patents than invest both in patenting and actual R&D. So you buy patents much like everybody buys insurance these days. Eventually all decent companies will be too scared to point to each others' patent pools that it becomes a cold-war situation, with maybe some little legal battles between smaller companies.