“A patent troll cost my former employer $300K for a totally baseless allegation just like I’ve described above.”
Courts allow defendants of baseless patent suits to recover the costs of litigation against both the plaintiff and the plaintiff’s attorney.
This is not to say that people still don’t abuse the patent system, but there are remedies to the worst of such abusers.
And this is clearly not a workable solution to the problem, as there are plenty of baseless patent cases being filed by patent trolls.
In my view, a simple solution is to align patent law with trademark law to require an owner to "use it or lose it." If an inventor doesn't use the invention, he loses patent protection. That way, an inventor could still sell a patent to those that wanted to use it in production, but it would prevent people from acquiring patents for no other purpose than to sue supposed "infringers."