Re: "Investigating patents requires ... money"
Sorry, but I have zero sympathy for those who have "difficulty" claiming exclusive ownership of something that's unavoidably derivative, as all so-called "creations" and "inventions" are, and thus should never rightfully be owned exclusively.
Naturally they find it "difficult", but it shouldn't be incumbent upon the rest of us to either disprove their dubious claims or be subjugated by them, rather they need to to prove them, regardless of "difficulty". If it's that "difficult" then maybe they ought to consider that their claims lack any real merit and substance in the first place.
And yes, I fully appreciate the irony of having to disprove the existence of something unknown in order to prove uniqueness, but in practice the assertion that such things are "unknown" is largely disingenuous, and typically an outright lie.
Does Apple seriously expect us to believe that they'd never heard of rectangles before they claimed to have "invented" them, for example?
That is what passes for "invention" in today's opportunistic patent regime, and the claimants' protestations of "difficulty" amount to little more than the idiot defence.
Maybe in an ideal world, not populated by opportunistic conmen and corporate tyrants, we could assume good faith and give claims to "invention" the benefit of the doubt, but as things stand I don't see that we have any choice but to insist all claims are unequivocally proven, at the claimant's full expense, before granting them these monopolistic privileges.
In reality little if anything is ever genuinely "invented", so frankly these monopolistic privileges shouldn't exists at all, but if they absolutely must then they should be proved to the same degree as any claim in academia, or be bluntly rejected.