Patents - the new tradeable goods in town

Great! Here is a company whose reason for existence is to trade in patents. They don’t implement any of it, they just keep filing or buying ‘em and selling ‘em. They say that the firm was founded to invest in innovation and invention.

Lessig also writes:

In 1991, according to The Patent Wars by Fred Warshofsky, Bill Gates said this about software patents:

If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today’s ideas were invented and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today. The solution … is patent exchanges … and patenting as much as we can… . A future start-up with no patents of its own will be forced to pay whatever price the giants choose to impose. That price might be high: Established companies have an interest in excluding future competitors.

So basically the idea is, set up a nice oligopoly, which holds just enough basic patents to prevent newer firms to enter the field without positioning them as slaves in the new upcoming Patent Economy. When will the rest of the world wake up to this?