So then, what, in your opinion, is "the actual nature of the invention"? Could you provide some legal reasoning behind what you consider "the actual nature of the invention"?
> In the most recent "When Patents Attack" episode, This American Life found 5,000 patents that covered the exact same 'invention.'
Oh lord, was that American Life episode a bad piece of reporting about patent-related things! In the entire show, the word "claims" appeared not once! Amongst the worst reporting I've seen, and I say this having read stuff on techdirt!
But since you bring up the "5000 patents on the same thing" claim, allow me to talk about that.
The guy who made that claim works for a firm called M-CAM, who provide a service to find similar patents based on content similarity. I looked through all of the "similar" patents they mentioned in that episode. Each and everyone one covered specific implementations of various aspects of cloud backup such as load-balancing, availability, de-duping, I/O performance for high-latency connections, etc. They were "on the same thing" inasmuch that they related to the broad area of online backup, but none had any claims that overlapped. If M-CAM had any good examples of patents covering "the same thing", they didn't mention a single one on that show.
Furthermore, M-CAM issue reports about the strength of various patent portfolios. I looked through some of the "reports". They were absolutely worthless. They considered two patents to "cover the same invention" if they had some keywords in common. To them, "Alice is taller than Bob" and "Alice is less tall than Bob" would be a claim on the "same thing".
Oh, but look! M-CAM also sell a "patent-risk management service" [1]! Strange that their claims on that show would lead some to think the patent system as something that is overly "risky", no?
(BTW, I am not the only one who thought M-CAM was full of crap [2].)
> They eventually invalidated it another way, after trolls collected hundreds of millions of dollars.
Interestingly, as described in the second episode, that patent was found invalid only because the inventor did not name all his co-inventors on it. He sneakily filed the patent alone, sold it to IV, and raked in millions of dollars as a cut of the royalties.
Leaving aside the fact that the inventor was a sleazebag, that throws the whole "patent trolls pay actual inventors very little" narrative -- one that the previous American Life episode played up -- right out the window. Oddly, nobody seems to report that.
[1] http://www.m-cam.com/sherwood-patent-risk-management-service...
[2] http://gametimeip.com/2012/04/13/q-why-was-mdb-capital-right...