You are right that there's a tradeoff. I'd say the tradeoff is not so bad if at least they get to be large before being sued out of existence. A way to address

You are right that there's a tradeoff. I'd say the tradeoff is not so bad if at least they get to be large before being sued out of existence. A way to address some of the problems that would arise for the protection of IP (what happens if google starts tomorrow the service disregarding the non enforceable patents?) would be to not commit to the patent fund patents that are both highly innovative and/or key to the business model, while committing the rest. Anyway what I wanted was to start a discussion on it not detail all the possibilities of a rather complex topic in a small HN comment ;)