By Chris Israel

Big Tech has long felt free to help itself to the good ideas of smaller companies. It's bad enough that these giants fiercely contest the efforts of inventors to receive fair compensation -- a courtroom mismatch between small startup firms with a good idea but little money on one side versus behemoths valued into the trillion-plus dollars on the other.

Now, however, Big Tech is taking the process one step further by launching a subterranean counterattack on the little guys -- claiming to be the real victim here.

For years now, Big Tech has been promoting the myth of "patent trolls." This army of creatures of courtroom legend supposedly files bogus patent infringement lawsuits by the truckload in order to grab "please go away" cash settlements from the tech giants. Now, the latter have added the new wrinkle of claiming that the United States is facing a crisis of "bad patents" -- in other words, that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has been failing on a mass scale by issuing patents that are too vague, too conventional, or so poorly written that it's impossible to know what invention or technology the patent encompasses.