You should read up on how the practice of "patent trolling" actually works. You will quickly find it's profoundly toxic to innovation, creativity, and progress. It's antithetical to almost everyone's values save for extremely greedy people and their lawyers.
Whether the patent is "trivial" or not doesn't even matter to these people. All that matters for them is that they can extract money.
Patent trolls make money by doing (very) lose pattern matching between what you do and the patent they hold, and then they demand an amount that they expect you to compare to the legal costs of arguing your point rather than the utility of the idea. It is a "gotcha" business model that is rightly reviled; the victims don't "choose" to use a patent, but rather the assertion of use is used as leverage by Myrvohld's company, and is expensive to defend regardless of merit. Therefore it is in their interest to assert every patent against every entity with any assets to take.
It is very unfortunate that the justice system is so broken as to make this a viable business model. There are cases of stealing, but there are far more cases of businesses doing normal things and receiving claims out-of-the-blue that they have to spend tens of thousands of dollars to defend.
The difference is when the patents are ridiculous or, to a layman, obvious. Take commenting on the internet; imagine that HN had to pay an x amount for each comment posted, because someone patented (and I'm sure someone HAS patented) the combination of a text input box and a submit button. Imagine YOU had to pay for that privilege.
There's a few good stories out there; google for patent troll in combination with newegg or cloudflare.
crispyambulance|5 years ago
Whether the patent is "trivial" or not doesn't even matter to these people. All that matters for them is that they can extract money.
javajosh|5 years ago
It is very unfortunate that the justice system is so broken as to make this a viable business model. There are cases of stealing, but there are far more cases of businesses doing normal things and receiving claims out-of-the-blue that they have to spend tens of thousands of dollars to defend.
Cthulhu_|5 years ago
There's a few good stories out there; google for patent troll in combination with newegg or cloudflare.