On a related note, I also find it incredible how people can make a living out of these kind of businesses and sleep well at night...
There's no real way for the defenders to make a profit, since getting damages out of the troll is basically impossible. And unfortunately, that means that even with pooled resources, trolls are purely a drag on the economy. But at least this way, they tend to lose and stop being a drag for the next guy.
Of course, it's hard because paying the opponent's fees opens up other kinds of abuse. If you get sued by Coca Cola, you can't just judge what lawyer you can afford, you have to realize that even a small decision against you could come with the million dollars in costs they paid to take the thing to court. I don't really know a good answer to "litigation is expensive, and that produces abuse".
Sanctions or frequent invalidation of patents would be great, though. One other thing I would love to see is a change to the choice-of-venue rules - this would be less of a problem if we weren't seeing every case fought in East Texas where summary judgement is impossible to get.
If the government can't put together competent reforms, maybe they could put up some money to reward people who get bad patents struck down? Hell, maybe some percentage of infringement winnings could be directed into a reward pool for patent strikedowns.
It'd decrease the overall value of patents, but I'm pretty ok with that.
What we do is legal, therefore it is not unethical; if it were unethical, it would be illegal.
Also, see irony.
Many people follow what I call Godfather's I ethics. Vito Corleone cares about his family and friends and will do rather mean things to those who threaten the well being of those around him.
Tribalism has stayed with us over the millennia and is unlikely to go away any time soon.
You can do unethical things using legal loopholes without it being necessarily illegal.
I'm guessing this is a good example of Poe's law.