Systemic corruption. The area benefits from having lot's of Patent cases.
Courts in the US are given an extremely high degree of independence, in the goal of limiting corruption.
And exactly the opposite ended up happening in this case, isn't it? Corruption is a world-wide problem, but I don't know how widespread it is in developed countries. And its the same problem, people sitting at the top don't have authority to curb the ground-level corruption. Here in India at least, the government has started implementing something called Lokpal:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lokpal
It is an agency which works at the ground-level to curb the corruption both in the private and public sectors (and also the ministry). A question arose, however, that what happens if the Lokpal people itself went corrupt? And that's why the concept of decentralization was introduced. The central Indian agency, CBI can check the corruption in Lokpal, and of course, the courts have authority over both CBI and Lokpal. Thus, decentralization is at least, the present way of stopping corruption here.
The Supreme Court's job is to issue smackdowns on appeals courts, and they have been doing so rather consistently. EFF is lobbying the lower federal courts at the moment. See this story for details: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/10/eff-asks-appeals-...
But yeah, the President is actually quite weak. The President can't do shit about this problem.
In fact, Obama has done this, but not to such an extreme degree.
http://www.wired.com/2014/03/obama-legacy-patent-trolls/
Excerpt:
Obama issued five executive orders on patent reform last summer. Among other things, they require the Patent and Trademark Office to stop issuing overly broad patents, and to force patent applicants to provide more details on what invention they are claiming. One of the orders opens up patent applications for public scrutiny — crowdsourcing — while they are in the approval stage, to help examiners locate prior art and assist with analyzing patent claims.