I'm with you on that. The fault is in the process not the company. Patents are antiquated and no longer work as they were designed to. For over 30 years it has been invent then produce and sell if you want to win.

The whole patenting system is now just for the big boys to rob the small guys, they patent what they can and if they can't patent it they ignore the patent and generally the little man who invents cannot afford to defend so doesn't patent his ideas. When two of the big boys fight over it the only people that make out of it are the lawyers, another waste of the earth's resources.

What is needed is an open source patent library where you can patent and not use, with some public spirited patent lawyer giving his time free. Sadly "lawyer" and "free" seem to break the rules of English as I have never seen them in the same sentence.