[impossiblefork]

Yes, but NPEs are necessary if patents are to be a thing also for smaller inventors.

An inventor can invent things that make a nuclear power plant cheaper or more efficient or better in some other way. He can't control whether the people and organizations who can afford nuclear plants decide to use his invention.

So NPEs are necessary for patents to work for small the inventor, and are how patents work for the small inventor. A small inventor in an expensive field is always a NPE.

[gumby]

I hate the typical use of NPEs but your point is correct. It’s like private equity companies: in principle quite reasonable but many people use them to extract the value of a business and leave a husk behind.

I don’t know of a way to fix these kinds of problems.

[impossiblefork]

I think the right idea is better patent examination.

If patent examination is correctly performed, then all patents will have real novelty and the people who have to license a patent haven't had anything taken away from them since the novelty means that they wouldn't have come up with the thing they have to license anyway.