The U.S. Needs to Make IP Policy a Priority, Now

A concern with people that write and prepare patents for inventors is that, in the desire to attack "patent trolls", the courts and laws have gone so far as to harm the basic rights of small inventors. Throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

If this harming of rights were true, then one could arguably expect funding for small startups to decline since those small startups would have less ability to protect their intellectual property and be more vulnerable to established competitors, which would result in the small startups having a lower likelihood of success.

As noted in the article, numbers for startups have declined, which lends credence to the idea that the courts and laws have gone too far. Furthermore, other jurisdictions (China) are picking up the slack and seeing increased startup activity.