The big issue is this: patents and trademarks don't exist to make money for companies. They exist to provide incentive for companies and people to produce innovation which over time becomes public domain. If things never enter the public domain (like Mickey) then the benefit to society is lost.
Patent term and copyright term are very different. I agree that copyright term has gotten out of hand. Trademarks have always been of indefinite term (assuming contiunued use and maintenance fee payments)
But these companies purposely file in courts that are either sympathetic to patent trolls or ignorant to technological issues (which is worse), and it creates a system where you need billions of dollars of patents to to innovate.
There is no court in the USA that is not ignorant to technological issues. Even the federal circuit (the appellate court that handles all patent appeals) is staffed almost entirely by judges that do not have a technical degree.
As for needing billions of dollars to innovate, you might want to check your facts. There are hundreds of thousands of patent applications filed every year. IBM files the most. About 3000 per year. There are a handful of other companies that file over 1000. The rest are filed by smaller companies, individuals etc. This clearly undercuts your assertion.
Heck, I drafted, filed, and prosecuted a patent application pro bono for a grad student the other year, and it recently issued. He developed the invention in his basement with almost no funding.
It is like the Cold War and MAD all over again, and the only people benefiting are the companies abusing the system.
Why? Because the only cases you hear about in the news have to do with Apple and Samsung? This is precisely the issue I raised in the OP. You are taking a teensy tiny number of cases and applying them to the system as a whole. See any problem with that?
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