I have nothing against the LES crowd. And I should note it includes a broad group of companies that span the gamut from cola to x-ray machine makers, though a big chunk of the crowd is from the electronics world.

One of the reasons this event is a relatively well-heeled affair is there is still plenty of money flowing in the patent world. The lawyers here think it is entirely reasonable for a decent patent to sell for a few hundred thousand dollars, give or take a leading digit. Things only get extravagant when people start talking about tens of millions of dollars—which they do.

In this crowd the high water mark for cost is measured by the $612 million settlement Research in Motion paid to get out from under the injunction threat of NTP Corp., a tiny firm that laid claim to having a key patent—though no product-- in wireless email. Even that settlement is not the ceiling. Top dollar to this crowd is two percent of a product's revenues over a period of five years. That's what they press for when push comes to shove in litigation.

Dear engineers: Wake up! While you are doing backflips trying to figure out how to save an additional fifty cents on your design, attorneys (at your own company) are loosely tossing around a few hundred thousand here and there on your patents and those of your colleagues at the company across the street. That's because they don't know how much a patent is worth. No one does.

I wonder how long you will keep your heads in the sand about what is going on with the output of your labor. It is time you asserted your voice (if not your patent) in the legal debates swirling around in your company and the industry at large.

There's a patent mania going on at the patent office, in the courts, in Congress and in backroom deals between electronics companies every day of the week. Right now lawyers are in charge of this debate because no one else is bothering to speak up. (Even CEOs are too busy, it seems, to pay attention.) It's time we heard the voice of the creators of the technology.

If they don't listen, you could stage a patent strike. That would get their attention.