A victory for the trolls

This makes sense up to a certain point, but there's huge problems with handing nuclear weapons out on the *assumption* that those getting them will generally tend to not use them against small fish often.

The *law* is supposed to decide who is punished and who isn't. (offcourse modified by the fact that the chance of getting caught ain't 100%)

But increasingly, we have laws where "Everyone is a criminal, few are prosecuted, but the penalties for those few who are -- are enormous."

This hands a lot of power to the people deciding who to prosecute. Power they're not supposed to have. A big company with many patents, say IBM, can at any time decide to destroy any small software-company they dislike by claiming patent-violation. They can do this for any reason whatsoever, though you're presumably right that most of the time economical considerations will be the most common reasoning.

It's not a good thing for competition to have an environment where any of the big can, at any time, take out any of the small. Offcourse being big they might be able to do that in any number of ways, but that's no argument in favor of giving them even -more- ammunition than they've already got.