Legit startups?
Seems to me that the whole US patent system has really lost its way, especially by allowing software patents. The whole concept of "patent" is to allow a person to profit from their invention for a period of time. In exchange for making their invention part of the public domain after a set period of time, the government (representing that amorphous thing called "society") spends a lot of taxpayer money enforcing the patent holders rights. Unfortunately, at 19 years, most software patents don't really add much to the value of the public domain. Let's not go into the 70 to 100 year copyright scam as it applies to software either.
So no, the USA has lost its way. The richest companies in the USA today are companies that freely copied from others and got away with it. Disney (copied Buster Keaton, and still swipes many of its stories from the public domain), Fox (moved to California from New York due to Californias lax copyright laws for the time), Microsoft (the list is very long there), and so on. Big pharma is just as guilty, blatantly copying things that shamans and witch doctors have used for centuries then claiming ownership. At least their stuff is still useful after 19 years, unlike most software.
So let's stop spending taxpayer money for a one-sided "intellectual property" deal with society that really only benefits only a few large corporations and a few wanna-be trolls. Let's let companies start competing on merits and real innovation (so put the monopolists up against the wall. Now.), not on an every growing legal community that adds very little.