The White House vs Patent Trolls - So What?

Kevin Drum's short piece for Mother Jones on Obama's proposal to deal with patent trolls says exactly what I would have said: nice ideas, unlikely to have any real impact, and still failing to deal with the core issue, which is Congress's utter failure to respond to a series of bad court decisions over the past 20+ years. Those decisions, and a variety of problems at the USPTO, have led to what Timothy B Lee called "a patent hangover". Both men hammer on the point that every post-grant reform proposal suffers from an inability to distinguish harmful trolls from legitimate patent users and until we stem the flow of bad patents we're only applying band-aids.