better to have a castle than to be a ronin.
The whole patent system seems to be a money making device for large corporations (and governments) with armies of attorneys. Instead of really investing time and energy in research that may lead to some legitimate breakthrough, corps divert their resources to paying attorneys to file patents for insipid ideas and obvious techniques (see one-click shopping).
Sure, some of the patents these corps get are for truly revolutionary things and are well-deserved so that they can recover the costs of developing the ideas and make a reasonable profit. But I fear that much of the patent filing is a hedge so that they can take money out of the pockets of the little guys who independently discover the same obvious techniques, etc.
I'm talking out of my league here as I'm not a lawyer. Sorry about that.