This line always comes out, for some reason, regarding patents. In other discussions we get completely different logic - eg: people get terribly riled up about whether Google is "evil" or not and it is rarely connected to whether it's legal or not.
The ultimate with your logic is that it would call for massive legislation to cover every facet of our lives - everything bad must be made illegal, otherwise nobody can even be criticised for doing it. I don't want to live in a world like that. Laws are far too crude for that, they can only work at extremes where it is clear you can put down a blanket rule. In between, people and companies behaving badly should be held to account through criticism and public pressure. We should expect companies to behave honorably and ethically and criticise them heavily when they don't.
Google gets grief over being "evil" because they publicly claimed not to be, and got a lot of popularity and goodwill in the marketplace as a result. When people get "riled up" about Google, they are threatening to take away that popularity and goodwill, that's all. It's not the same thing.
Also, what makes you think we don't already have "massive legislation to cover every facet of our lives"? Have you ever heard of the book "Three Felonies a Day"?
I take exception to being accused of delivering 'a line'. I commented, as I only ever do, when I see a truth that for whatever reason I decide to broadcast publicly. The veracity of my statement may be the source of its ubiquity you observe.
Increased legislation is rarely the answer. I do not have a pre-rolled solution for the 'patent problem', but - contrary to popular opinion - this is not required to point out flaws in the current system. Perhaps the current system is the best we can do, but that does not excuse its flaws. We should always aim for what could be - and what we could, maybe, come up with is a system that encourages innovation (through financial reward) yet disallows this kind of destructive behaviour. How? Who knows.
I bet 10 years ago if you applied such thinking to finance you wouldn't have got very far - "central bankers supplying fiat money is good enough"...yet now we have Bitcoin et. al., a whole host of currencies whose aggregate behaviour is mathematically provable.
Focus on the could, anything less is not worthy of the tag 'innovation'.
"This line always comes out" - as does yours. We can only solve patent trolls by legislating every small piece of our lives is a fallacy of logic. One doesn't inevitably mean the other.
The ultimate with your logic is that it would call for massive legislation to cover every facet of our lives - everything bad must be made illegal, otherwise nobody can even be criticised for doing it. I don't want to live in a world like that. Laws are far too crude for that, they can only work at extremes where it is clear you can put down a blanket rule. In between, people and companies behaving badly should be held to account through criticism and public pressure. We should expect companies to behave honorably and ethically and criticise them heavily when they don't.