The politicians don't need to do anything, at least not in response to this specifically.
If it's as bad as you say (and it's not, this is one ruling in one case and not a final one) then the companies will simply stop and put down their guns. They're not run by stupid people, when the cost of legal actions and settlements outweighs the possible benefits, they'll revert to the previous position - only the most outrageous violations will be followed up.
This specific situation - the recent upsurge in actions (but NOT the more general issues with patent) is something that the market can sort out.
The real problem with patents isn't multibillion dollar companies slugging it out, they've got the legal muscle and licensing budgets to be OK, it's with the small players who can't or won't develop products out of fear that they're going to violate some patent they're not even aware of owned by some multi-billion dollar organisation who'll squash them without thinking.
"The market" will only sort this out properly if it is efficient. There's too much uncertainty for that to be the case. Put another way, how is a company supposed to come up with an accurate expected value of suing/defending? There are so many unknown factors that have significant impact on the outcome.
Eventually, once a lot of those unknowns become accurately estimable, then yes the market can solve these problems. But there's a giant cost associated with waiting around for that.
How is that more uncertain than anything in business? How many will my product sell? How fast? What's going to happen to materials prices? What are my competitors going to do?
By that logic the market couldn't work for 98% of products.
Legal action I'd suggest is certainly no harder to predict than that and probably easier.
Patents are anti-freemarket - they are restrictions on what one can actually do to their own property. They are government granted monopolies, that's about as anti-freemarket as you can get.
If it's as bad as you say (and it's not, this is one ruling in one case and not a final one) then the companies will simply stop and put down their guns. They're not run by stupid people, when the cost of legal actions and settlements outweighs the possible benefits, they'll revert to the previous position - only the most outrageous violations will be followed up.
This specific situation - the recent upsurge in actions (but NOT the more general issues with patent) is something that the market can sort out.
The real problem with patents isn't multibillion dollar companies slugging it out, they've got the legal muscle and licensing budgets to be OK, it's with the small players who can't or won't develop products out of fear that they're going to violate some patent they're not even aware of owned by some multi-billion dollar organisation who'll squash them without thinking.