Trolls get a bad rap, and I'm opposed to trolling as opposed to licensing to manufacturers, but they're one possible form of middleman between inventors and infringers.
One major point of a patent is to compensate the inventor for doing something smart. If the trolls are "non-practicing", then they must have acquired their patent from an inventor. How much are inventors getting paid?
Second: both the times an entity I was part of was on the receiving end of a patent troll, there was at least circumstantial evidence that the troll hadn't invented anything. The first time was when one of the students at my dorm came up with the idea of hooking up our laundry machines to the Internet for a senior project. Shortly after they got Slashdoted someone filed for a patent on the idea. The second time was when the place I worked went to some outside contractors, and they tried to file patents based on the designs we gave them.
The idea is that the original inventor publishes the secret sauce via the required public disclosures and people either license the technology from him, he sues people who copy the technology without licensing, or he just cashes out and sells his whole interest to some other entity that does any of the above.
If someone else independently comes up with the same idea within a relatively short time frame, well in that case I don't think the patent should be granted. I think the legally sensible thing to do is to move patents in the direction of being an unfair competition type claim (unfair because you simply copy someone else's technology instead of developing your own).
In those rare cases, it should be a requirement to produce a detailed description of the method by which the desired result is achieved, and that the patent would cover that specific method.
"Attaching a computer to a database" is not a method. A very specific driver format employing particular protocols is.
In theory, that's how it is. In order to receive a patent, you must first "reduce it to practice". That doesn't mean you have to build it yourself, but it does mean that you have to describe it in sufficient enough detail that a person of "ordinary skill in the art" should be able to actually build it.
In practice, that doesn't happen. Part of that is that a lot of really general patents got through in the 90s, as the article states. Another part is that patents are written in such thick legalese that you almost need formal education just to make sense of the language, and most people in software won't even bother.
Part of the problem was that every web business in the 90's figured that storing their data online and delivering it by browser was a brand new idea so they all got the same patents over and over. Every troll on the block has a "data on a server" patent.