I'll preface this by saying that IANAL, but I've been tangentially involved in the licensing and sale of patent portfolios and have read hundreds of patents. I'

I'll preface this by saying that IANAL, but I've been tangentially involved in the licensing and sale of patent portfolios and have read hundreds of patents. I'm also an inventor on many. Most patents (including mine!) don't get used simply because there's no one practically using those inventions. The comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8838681 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8838681 hits the nail on the head. It's not usually because they are too expensive or risky to license or that the inventions themselves are not technically interesting. It's just that the market or industry ends up using technology (which itself is often patented) that does not infringe the vast majority of patents. As an example, I once saw a patent on sale that was a precursor to DHTs and could potentially read on systems like Amazon Dynamo. But the way they did DHTs was completely different from Dynamo, and in fact, different from Chord, CAN, Pastry, Kademlia or any of the other DHTs in academia and practice (all of which the patent pre-dated). Hence, as interesting as it was, it had no commercial value. I've seen this pattern repeat in many other fields of technology. The fact that only < 1% of patents are ever asserted simply reinforces this notion. This is not surprising, since in most engineering there are many ways to implement the same idea, and each of these ways can be patented. But typically an industry converges on a few ways of doing things and the other approaches lay unused. Does this mean the system is broken? Consider academia. Think of all the hundreds of papers that get published in computer-related fields alone. Then think of how many of those actually make it into production. Does that mean academia is broken? The patent system may be flawed, but this is not why. This article essentially is an ad for the author's new venture, simply using the "broken patent system" meme to get some free publicity. As an aside, the "create efficient market for patents" language TFA uses at the end is oddly similar to the rhetoric Intellectual Ventures started off with. Initially IV was adamant that they would only license and not litigate, but more experienced people in the licensing business knew that was laughable. After all, a patent is nothing but a right to sue.