Exactly right. If 1% of 100 patents are bad, there's 1 bad patent out there. If 0.001% of 100,000,000 patents are bad, you have 1,000 bad patents and the prob

Exactly right. If 1% of 100 patents are bad, there's 1 bad patent out there. If 0.001% of 100,000,000 patents are bad, you have 1,000 bad patents and the problem is 1,000 times worse due to scale, because you only got a thousand times better and you needed to be a million times better to keep pace with the problem. And no, you can't sensibly distribute the costs of that across the population in a case like this. Patents can be asserted against everyone independently, so a larger population makes things worse, no better, as it gives trolls more victims, rather than distributing the cost. It's not as if patent litigation is over for a patent once they've sued one person (though it is interesting to imagine a model where a patent might be 'exhausted' once the holder collected 'enough' money through litigation).