Efficient Infringement of Patents

From the article:

"Once inventors know that the deck of (legal) cards is stacked against them and that they will suffer efficient infringement, they will create less patentable innovation. Without legal security in stable and effective property rights, venture capitalists will not invest in inventors or startups and the innovation economy will suffer."

I am interested in hearing from those in the VC community about how they feel and think about patents and this idea of infringement that, for all intents and purposes, cannot be stopped simply because you have a patent.

I have always had a love-hate relationship with patents. I have probably read through thousands of them in my career. I can't possibly count how many times I have said "this patent is bullshit". And yet, they got one.

On the other side of things, if you invest a substantial amount of time and money on developing a technology you want to have as much protection on your side as possible. To date, my largest and longest R&D project took approximately ten years to go from idea to a working technology. When you do something like that --particularly when it is self-funded, as this was-- you embrace any legally obtainable protection you can get, not doing so would be irresponsible.

These days I am not approaching anything of that time scale. However, I am approaching hardware/software products with market potential in the hundreds of millions to billions of dollars. It seems to me that patents are simply unavoidable, only because if someone comes knocking with their patent you can produce yours and avert disaster.

The LOT network seems like a very interesting idea. I haven't thought that one through yet.