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So you suggest that all engineers should hire patent lawyers just to monitor the current "patent horizon" and read through all patent database after they write a line of code/solder a chip. "

You don't have to be a patent lawyer to read a patent. The government doesn't even require you to have a law degree to review and submit patents. And, yeah, I am calling for people to review patents before they're approved by the USPTO. Consider this: People are willing to put all kinds of personal time & effort into writing code, but NONE into efforts which (1) have a tangible impact on their own freedoms, and (2) which could effectively be distributed efficiently across a wide group of people who are skilled in the subject matter for a particular patent. The reason that people won't do this is because they prefer to stand against the system rather than work within its parameters. That's fine, as long as you understand that you're going to lose, going down that road. There's simply too much money aligned against you -- and money talks.



That's actually not true. Google for "Google Microsoft Apple sued for patent infringement". A lot of small-time inventors have been awarded hundreds of millions of dollars from the big dogs for infringement. You hear about the big dogs suing one another, but the real story is untold. Small inventors have far more to protect and gain -- relative to their size -- than big companies. I'm not denying that some of them are trolls. But a lot of them aren't.