[tzs]

Almost all troll activity I've noticed has been around software patents or business method patents, and generally involves patents that should not have been issued in the first place.

I'd rather see reform that either eliminates software patents, or provides the patent offices the resources to come up with a way to examine software patent applications sufficiently to stop issuing bad software patents.

[AnthonyMouse]

As far as I can tell nearly all software patents are bad software patents. If you can infringe a patent by accident having never heard of the patent holder or their so-called invention, that should be pretty strong evidence that the patent is excessively abstract or claiming something obvious. But that's the entire patent troll business model. There are zero people going through their inscrutable patent applications to find inventions to use and then infringing them on purpose. If you got rid of all the bad software patents there would be hardly anything left. Because hardly anybody infringes on purpose so nobody even bothers to apply for software patents that no one would infringe by accident.

I think it's the nature of the field. Patenting a specific way to do something in software is completely useless because there are always many different reasonable ways to achieve the same result. The only software patents that have value are the ones that are unreasonably broad because anything narrower can be easily avoided.