Here's what KK quoted:

Over the years, I have seen hundreds of examples of money machine people being severely done in by the patent system. Even murdered by it in several heart-attack-during-litigation cases. And not once did I see anyone approaching the patent system on a small scale basis and profiting from it. Ever. Once again: Unless you are well within a Fortune 500 context, any and all involvement in the patent system in any, shape, or form is absolutely certain to cause you the net loss of time, energy, money, and sanity. Besides ending up a totally useless and utterly unnecessary psychic energy sink.

Maybe the pdf has more information about building machines that either singularly or at least collectively are resilient to patent attacks.

I've worked for two non-F500 (think 10-25 engineers) companies that made their revenues developing, consulting on, and licensing, their patented technology.

It still sounds like pretty good advice given the context.

There are lots of non-F500 companies that make their revenues developing and consulting on non-patented technology, so it doesn't necessarily follow that their revenues were solely due to patents.

Would they have made as much money if they didn't patent their technology?

We sold technology, not end user products, because we weren't in the business of who could find the cheapest Chinese manufacturer. If we didn't have patents, we'd have to replicate a fragile version of them contractually. Patents gave us a ready made legal instrument we could transact with. I think that's their real value to industry.

I don't think we ever sued anyone, but we probably would have had little use for the ability to sue people who arrived at the technology independently. Our worry wasn't about monopolizing the idea, because it wasn't obvious, but protecting ourselves from getting ripped off through copying. We probably wouldn't have published on it then though.

I mentioned this in another thread, but I'll reference it here. So you know about the Ansari X Prize. The company who won it was Scaled Composites, headed by Burt Rutan. The actual work was the result of investment by Paul Allen. The Spaceship One was patented, and the IP is held by a holding company that embodies Allen's investment. Allen didn't invest in the research for the piddling $10 million prize. He didn't do it so he could get into the spaceship manufacturing business. He did it so he could sell the IP to someone who wanted to handle the actual building and flying part of the equation. Burt Rutan is objectively a genius, and has invested 30 years in Scaled Composites. What is the end result of those 30 years of research by top-notch PhD's? The company doesn't have huge factories, a stockpile of cash, etc. The value of the business is a pile of IP.

I don't think the law has to protect every business model, but I do think it's a little weird that you can employ a team of construction workers for a year to build a house and have some hard assets to show for it, but people argue that you shouldn't have anything to show for employing a team of PhD's for a year. There has to be some mechanism for transacting in the results of research. Maybe that mechanism needs to look different than the existing patent mechanism, but I think it needs to exist. I think there is value in a company full of PhD's that's not intrinsically bogged down with the need to manufacture end-user products.

The pdf continues "The problem is not the patent system per se, but all the popular mythology that has built up around what patents are and how they are supposed to work. That quarter you mailed in for your classified ad "inventor's idea kit" in the seventh grade has done more damage in more ways to more people more often than you could possibly ever imagine."

I read that to suggest the "popular mythology" of patents as small inventors making millions from patents as completely wrong. Not sure what to make of the inventor's idea kit sentence.