Patent absurdity

I have to say I've been astounded at the explosion over the past few years of patent litigation. The most surprising aspect to this is how companies even get patents for some of these vague conceptual entities instead of concrete implementation. What, a patent on digital image compression in general? Come on, where has common sense gone! Patents like this are simply absurd, and clearly the patent process is in need of a major overhaul.

It staggers the imagination that a company can basically see that some already in-use, widespread technology either doesn't have a patent, or there is an old patent on the books (that typically was still issued long after the technology was in use) that they can buy the rights to for the sole purpose of trying to extort money from companies using that technology.

What a country.